CKA Troubleshooting Practice Question
Which command can be used to view resource usage of nodes in a cluster?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
kubectl top nodes
'kubectl top nodes', correctly displays CPU and memory usage for all nodes in the cluster, provided the metrics server is deployed. Option A, 'kubectl describe nodes', shows detailed node information but not resource usage metrics. Option B, 'kubectl top pods', shows pod resource usage, not nodes. Option C, 'kubectl get pods --show-resources', is not a valid command in kubectl.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
kubectl describe nodes
Why it's wrong here
kubectl describe nodes prints a node's static metadata, capacity/allocatable resources, and current conditions/events, but it does not sample live CPU/memory utilization. It reports how much resources a node can hold, not how much is currently consumed by workloads. To see actual usage metrics you need the metrics server and kubectl top nodes.
- ✗
kubectl top pods
Why it's wrong here
kubectl top pods returns per-pod CPU and memory usage across a namespace or all namespaces, aggregating the resource consumption of containers inside each pod. While this indirectly reflects node load, it does not give a node-wide aggregate or show node-level allocatable versus used capacity. The question explicitly asks for node resource usage, so pod-scoped metrics are the wrong scope.
- ✗
kubectl get pods --show-resources
Why it's wrong here
kubectl get pods does not support a --show-resources flag; valid flags for showing extra details include -o wide or -o yaml/json, but none output live resource utilization. Attempting to run this command will fail with an unknown flag error. There is no built-in kubectl get resource that directly displays pod CPU/memory usage — that requires kubectl top.
- ✓
kubectl top nodes
Why this is correct
kubectl top nodes queries the Metrics API, which is backed by metrics-server, to report each node's current CPU and memory usage as a percentage of allocatable capacity. This is the standard command for quickly assessing real-time node utilization in a cluster. It requires the metrics-server (or a compatible metrics API) to be installed and producing node metrics.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CKA practice question is part of Courseiva's free CNCF certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CKA exam.