KCNA Cloud Native Observability Practice Test 2 — 15 Questions

Question 1

Which TWO of the following are recommended practices for achieving observability in a Kubernetes cluster?

Accepted Answer

Include correlation IDs in structured logs to enable tracing across services.. Including correlation IDs in structured logs is a key observability practice that enables distributed tracing across microservices. In Kubernetes, where requests often traverse multiple pods and services, correlation IDs allow you to link logs from different components into a single transaction flow, which is essential for debugging and understanding system behavior.

Answer

Use a single centralized logging solution to aggregate logs from all components.

Answer

Store all debug logs for a minimum of 90 days for compliance.

Answer

Disable leader election for monitoring components to reduce complexity.

Question 2

Drag and drop the steps to perform a backup of etcd in a Kubernetes cluster into the correct order.

Accepted Answer

Access the node, Save snapshot, Verify, Store securely. Access the node, save snapshot, verify, store securely, and restore when necessary.

Answer

Save snapshot, Verify, Access the node, Store securely

Answer

Access the node, Store securely, Save snapshot, Verify

Answer

Verify, Access the node, Save snapshot, Store securely

Question 3

Match each Kubernetes security concept to its definition.

Accepted Answer

RBAC: Controls access to the Kubernetes API based on roles and permissions.. RBAC and NetworkPolicy are fundamental security mechanisms. ServiceAccount provides identity. The distractors confuse RBAC with secrets management and NetworkPolicy with user access control.

Answer

RBAC: Manages secrets and encryption at rest.

Answer

NetworkPolicy: Controls which users can access the cluster.

Question 4

Which of the following is a core component of the three pillars of observability?

Accepted Answer

Logs. The three pillars of observability are logs, metrics, and traces. Alerting is derived from metrics, not a pillar itself.

Answer

Alerting

Answer

SLIs

Answer

Dashboards

Question 5

What is the primary purpose of Prometheus in cloud native observability?

Accepted Answer

Collect and store metrics. Prometheus is a metric system that collects and stores numeric time-series data.

Answer

Provide distributed tracing

Answer

Visualize data

Answer

Collect and store logs

Question 6

Which command retrieves logs from a specific container named 'sidecar' in a multi-container pod?

Accepted Answer

kubectl logs pod-name -c sidecar. The -c flag specifies the container name.

Answer

kubectl logs pod-name sidecar

Answer

kubectl logs pod-name --container sidecar

Answer

kubectl logs sidecar pod-name

Question 7

In OpenTelemetry, what is the purpose of the Collector component?

Accepted Answer

Receive, process, and export telemetry data. The OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor-agnostic agent or gateway that receives telemetry data (traces, metrics, logs) from instrumented applications, processes it (e.g., batching, filtering, sampling), and exports it to one or more backends (e.g., Jaeger, Prometheus, or any OTLP-compatible system). It decouples data generation from data export, enabling flexible pipeline management without modifying application code.

Answer

Instrument code automatically

Answer

Visualize traces and metrics

Answer

Aggregate logs from multiple sources

Question 8

Which Prometheus metric type is best suited to count the number of HTTP requests received?

Accepted Answer

Counter. A counter is a cumulative metric that only increases, ideal for counting requests.

Answer

Gauge

Answer

Histogram

Answer

Summary

Question 9

What is the purpose of Alertmanager in Prometheus?

Accepted Answer

Handle alert notifications. Alertmanager is the component in the Prometheus ecosystem responsible for handling alerts fired by the Prometheus server. It deduplicates, groups, and routes alerts to configured notification channels such as email, PagerDuty, or Slack, ensuring that operators receive actionable notifications without alert fatigue.

Answer

Visualize metrics

Answer

Store long-term metrics

Answer

Collect metrics from targets

Question 10

Which tool is primarily used for distributed tracing in cloud native environments?

Accepted Answer

Jaeger. Jaeger is a popular open-source distributed tracing system.

Answer

Grafana

Answer

Fluentd

Answer

Prometheus

Question 11

What is context propagation in distributed tracing?

Accepted Answer

Carrying trace context (trace ID, span ID) across services. Context propagation carries trace context across service boundaries to connect spans into a single trace.

Answer

Sampling traces to reduce data volume

Answer

Visualizing traces in a user interface

Answer

Storing trace data in a centralized database

Question 12

Which component of the metrics-server provides resource metrics like CPU and memory usage?

Accepted Answer

metrics-server. The metrics-server collects resource metrics from kubelets and exposes them via the Metrics API.

Answer

kube-apiserver

Answer

kubelet

Answer

Prometheus

Question 13

What does SLA stand for in the context of service reliability?

Accepted Answer

Service Level Agreement. SLA stands for Service Level Agreement, a contract specifying expected service level.

Answer

Service Level Indicator

Answer

Service Level Availability

Answer

Service Level Objective

Question 14

Which log aggregation tool is designed specifically for Kubernetes and is often used as a lightweight alternative to Fluentd?

Accepted Answer

Fluent Bit. Fluent Bit is a lightweight log processor and forwarder, often used in Kubernetes.

Answer

Logstash

Answer

Loki

Answer

Elasticsearch

Question 15

A team wants to implement cost monitoring for their Kubernetes clusters. Which approach is most effective?

Accepted Answer

Use cloud provider billing APIs combined with resource utilization data. Cloud provider billing APIs provide actual cost data per resource (e.g., per node, per persistent volume, per network egress), and combining this with resource utilization data (e.g., CPU/memory requests and actual usage from metrics) enables accurate cost allocation per namespace, pod, or workload. This approach directly maps infrastructure spend to Kubernetes abstractions, which is essential for chargeback or showback in multi-tenant clusters.

Answer

Use kubectl top to get resource usage

Answer

Estimate costs based on node count

Answer

Monitor CPU and memory usage with Prometheus