KCNA Cloud Native Observability Practice Test 2 — 15 Questions

Question 1

Match each Kubernetes security concept to its definition.

Question 2

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 3

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 4

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 5

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 6

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 7

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 8

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 9

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 10

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 11

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 12

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 13

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. Option A is correct because 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

Question 14

Which TWO are pillars of observability? (Select two.)

Accepted Answer

Logs. Logs and Metrics are two of the three pillars of observability (alongside Traces). Logs provide immutable, timestamped records of discrete events, while Metrics are numeric aggregations of data over time (e.g., Prometheus counters, histograms). Together they form the foundation for understanding system behavior in cloud-native environments.

Answer

SLIs

Answer

Alerting

Answer

Dashboards

Question 15

Which THREE are responsibilities of the OpenTelemetry project? (Select three.)

Accepted Answer

Provide instrumentation libraries. OpenTelemetry provides SDKs for instrumentation, a collector for processing, and APIs for standards.

Answer

Visualize telemetry data

Answer

Store long-term telemetry data