CKA Troubleshooting Practice Question

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` provides a broad overview of node configuration including labels, taints, conditions, capacity, allocatable, and resource requests/limits from pods scheduled on that node. However, it does not display live CPU and memory usage in real time; it shows requested vs. allocatable resources, not actual current utilization. To see real-time consumption, you must use `kubectl top`.

• ✗

  kubectl logs nodes

  Why it's wrong here

  `kubectl logs` is designed to fetch container logs from pod containers, not from Kubernetes node objects. Nodes are not pods, so they have no associated container whose log stream could be retrieved. Running `kubectl logs nodes` will produce an error such as `error: cannot get logs from node` because logs are only available for pod containers.

• ✗

  kubectl get nodes -o wide

  Why it's wrong here

  The `kubectl get nodes -o wide` command prints node metadata such as internal/external IP addresses, hostname, OS image, kernel version, and container runtime. It does not query the metrics-server or kubelet's cAdvisor for live CPU or memory utilization. Instead, it displays static configuration and status information about the node, not real-time resource consumption.

• ✓

  kubectl top nodes

  Why this is correct

  The `kubectl top nodes` command retrieves resource usage data from the Metrics API, which is typically backed by a metrics-server that collects node-level metrics from kubelets. It reports current CPU and memory consumption in both absolute units (e.g., millicores and MiB) and as percentages of node allocatable resources. This is exactly the command needed to answer the question about node resource usage.

Go deeper

Related to this question