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KCNA · domain

Cloud Native Observability

Practise KCNA NAT and PAT questions covering address translation types, inside/outside interface roles, static vs dynamic vs PAT, and troubleshooting missing or incorrect translations.

84 questions17 easy41 medium26 hard

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Practice Cloud Native Observability questions

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What this domain covers

What to know about Cloud Native Observability

Cloud concepts questions usually test the service model (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS) and deployment model (public/private/hybrid/community) appropriate for a given scenario.

IaaS, PaaS and SaaS responsibilities and examples.

Public, private, hybrid and community cloud deployment models.

On-premises vs cloud trade-offs: cost, control, scalability.

How cloud connectivity options (VPN, Direct Connect, ExpressRoute) work.

Why learners struggle

Why Cloud Native Observability questions are commonly missed

NAT questions are missed when learners confuse the four address types (inside local, inside global, outside local, outside global) or misapply the interface direction. A translation rule can look correct but still fail if the ACL, interface, or direction is wrong.

  • ·Inside local vs inside global — inside local is the private source, inside global is the translated public address
  • ·PAT overloads — many sources share one public IP using unique port numbers
  • ·Interface direction — ip nat inside and ip nat outside must be on the correct interfaces
  • ·Static NAT vs dynamic NAT vs PAT — each serves a different use case
  • ·The NAT ACL identifies traffic to translate, not traffic to permit or deny
  • ·A missing translation can look like a routing problem if the interfaces are misconfigured

Watch out for

Common Cloud Native Observability exam traps

  • IaaS gives you infrastructure control; SaaS gives you only the application.
  • Hybrid cloud combines on-premises and public cloud — not two public clouds.
  • Cloud does not automatically mean cheaper or more secure.
  • Management responsibility shifts with each service model (IaaSPaaSSaaS).

Question index

All Cloud Native Observability questions (84)

Click any question to see the full explanation, or start a practice session above.

1

When using OpenTelemetry, what is the role of the 'Collector'?

Hard
2

Which TWO of the following are valid PromQL functions? (Select two.)

Medium
3

A developer wants to view the logs of a specific container named 'sidecar' in a pod called 'web-app'. Which command should they use?

Medium
4

Which Prometheus metric type is used to represent a value that can increase or decrease over time, such as memory usage?

Easy
5

Which THREE of the following are components of the OpenTelemetry project?

Hard
6

What is the main advantage of using OpenTelemetry over vendor-specific instrumentation libraries?

Hard
7

Which Prometheus metric type is best suited for counting the total number of HTTP requests received by a service?

Easy
8

An organization uses Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring. They want to alert when the 99th percentile of request latency exceeds 500ms for more than 5 minutes. Which PromQL query should they use in the alert rule?

Medium
9

What is the purpose of the metrics-server in Kubernetes?

Easy
10

Which TWO of the following are valid Prometheus metric types?

Medium
11

In OpenTelemetry, which component is responsible for receiving, processing, and exporting telemetry data from multiple sources?

Medium
12

In Prometheus, what is the purpose of the Alertmanager component?

Hard
13

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

Medium
14

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

Medium
15

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

Medium
16

Which THREE of the following are benefits of using a service mesh for observability? (Select three.)

Medium
17

A DevOps team notices that a microservice is returning 503 errors intermittently. The service runs in Kubernetes and uses a liveness probe. The team wants to understand the root cause without restarting the pod. Which observability approach should they use first?

Medium
18

Which of the following is NOT one of the three pillars of observability?

Easy
19

An application is instrumented with OpenTelemetry to export traces to Jaeger. The team notices that some traces are incomplete. What is the most likely cause?

Medium
20

What type of Prometheus metric is best suited to count the total number of HTTP requests received by a service?

Medium
21

Which tool is specifically designed for log aggregation and is built by Grafana Labs as a lightweight, cost-effective alternative to traditional log systems?

Medium
22

Which TWO of the following are Prometheus metric types? (Select two.)

Medium
23

A team wants to set up alerts when a Kubernetes pod consumes more than 90% of its memory limit for over 5 minutes. They use Prometheus and Alertmanager. Which Prometheus query would trigger an alert for a specific pod named 'web-app' in the 'default' namespace?

Hard
24

Which of the following is considered one of the three pillars of observability?

Easy
25

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

Medium
26

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

Easy
27

An SRE team defines an SLO that 99.9% of requests to a service should complete in under 500ms over a 30-day rolling window. If the service receives 10 million requests in a month, what is the maximum number of requests that can exceed the latency threshold while still meeting the SLO?

Hard
28

Which THREE of the following are core components of the OpenTelemetry specification? (Select three.)

Hard
29

A platform team wants to implement observability for a Kubernetes cluster running 500+ microservices. They need to reduce the cost of storing logs while retaining the ability to search for specific error patterns. Which strategy best achieves this?

Hard
30

Which TWO of the following are valid components of the Alertmanager configuration? (Select two.)

Hard
31

A DevOps team wants to collect logs from all Kubernetes nodes and forward them to a central log storage system. Which tool is specifically designed for lightweight log aggregation and forwarding on Kubernetes nodes?

Medium
32

A team wants to visualize metrics from Prometheus in a dashboard. Which tool is commonly used for this purpose?

Medium
33

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

Hard
34

Which tool is specifically designed for distributed tracing and is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) graduated project?

Medium
35

Which component of the OpenTelemetry architecture is responsible for receiving data from instrumented applications and processing it before export?

Medium
36

Which TWO of the following tools are commonly used for distributed tracing in cloud-native environments? (Select two.)

Easy
37

In PromQL, which function would you use to calculate the per-second rate of increase of a counter over a specified time window?

Hard
38

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

Hard
39

A Kubernetes administrator is troubleshooting a pod that is stuck in CrashLoopBackOff. The pod's restart count is increasing. Which initial step should the administrator take to diagnose the issue?

Easy
40

Which of the following is the correct definition of a Service Level Indicator (SLI)?

Easy
41

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

Hard
42

In distributed tracing, what is a 'span'?

Medium
43

Which component is responsible for aggregating metrics from Kubernetes nodes and exposing them to the metrics API?

Medium
44

Which of the following is NOT one of the three pillars of observability in cloud-native environments?

Easy
45

Which THREE of the following are important considerations when defining SLOs (Service Level Objectives)? (Select three.)

Hard
46

In the context of distributed tracing, what is a 'span'?

Medium
47

Match each Kubernetes security concept to its definition.

Medium
48

What is the primary purpose of structured logging?

Easy
49

Which TWO of the following are common log aggregation tools used in Kubernetes environments? (Select two)

Medium
50

What is context propagation in distributed tracing?

Hard
51

What is the primary purpose of structured logging?

Easy
52

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

Medium
53

Which THREE of the following are benefits of structured logging? (Select three.)

Medium
54

What is the purpose of Alertmanager in Prometheus?

Easy
55

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

Hard
56

Which TWO of the following are best practices for implementing observability in a cloud-native environment?

Medium
57

A developer wants to monitor the health of a Kubernetes deployment by checking if the number of ready replicas matches the desired replicas. Which metric from kube-state-metrics should they query?

Easy
58

A team wants to ensure that at least 99.9% of all requests to their application complete within 500ms over a 30-day window. How should this requirement be classified?

Medium
59

A company uses Prometheus for monitoring and wants to alert when the average CPU usage over 5 minutes exceeds 80%. Which PromQL query would correctly define this alert rule?

Hard
60

Which of the following is true about Prometheus's pull-based model for collecting metrics?

Medium
61

A Prometheus alert rule fires when the error rate exceeds 5% for 5 minutes. The alert is sent to Alertmanager. What must be configured in Alertmanager to ensure the alert is deduplicated, grouped, and routed to the correct team?

Hard
62

A company deploys a microservice application on Kubernetes. They notice that one of the services is returning 5xx errors intermittently. Which observability tool should they use to correlate the errors with resource usage across all pods of that service?

Medium
63

A company uses OpenTelemetry to instrument their microservices. They want to ensure that traces from one service can be correlated with those from another service across network calls. Which OpenTelemetry concept enables this correlation?

Hard
64

What does the 'kubectl logs' command retrieve?

Easy
65

Which tool is commonly used for log aggregation in Kubernetes and is designed to be lightweight?

Easy
66

You are an SRE managing a Kubernetes cluster with 200 nodes and 10,000 pods. The cluster runs a critical payment processing application. Users report that transactions are occasionally failing with a 'timeout' error. You have Prometheus and Grafana set up for monitoring, and you use Fluentd with Elasticsearch for logging. You notice that during peak hours, the CPU usage of the payment service pods spikes to 90%, but memory usage remains stable. The pod restart count is low. You also see that the response time of the payment service increases significantly during these spikes. You need to identify the root cause and propose a fix. Which course of action is most appropriate?

Hard
67

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

Medium
68

Which open-source project provides a unified standard for collecting and exporting telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces) from applications?

Medium
69

Which THREE of the following are valid use cases for distributed tracing in a microservices architecture?

Medium
70

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

Medium
71

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

Easy
72

Which TWO of the following are best practices for structuring log output in cloud-native applications to maximize observability?

Hard
73

A developer wants to view the logs of a specific container named 'sidecar' inside a pod named 'app-pod'. Which command should they use?

Medium
74

A platform team is designing a monitoring strategy for a multi-tenant Kubernetes cluster. Each tenant runs workloads in separate namespaces. The team needs to ensure tenant isolation while providing aggregated cluster-wide dashboards. Which approach best meets these requirements?

Hard
75

A company is running a microservices application on a Kubernetes cluster. They have noticed that one of the services, 'payment-api', is experiencing intermittent high latency. The team wants to identify the root cause without modifying the application code. Which approach should they take?

Medium
76

A company runs a Kubernetes cluster with 50 worker nodes, each hosting multiple microservices. They use Prometheus for metrics collection and Grafana for dashboards. Recently, the Prometheus server has been experiencing out-of-memory (OOM) kills during peak hours, causing gaps in metric collection. The cluster has a dedicated monitoring namespace. The team has already increased the Prometheus pod's memory limits to 8GB, but OOMs still occur. The metrics retention is set to 15 days. The cardinality of certain metrics (e.g., HTTP request labels with user IDs) is very high. The team needs to resolve the OOM issue without losing critical alerting capability for at least the last 7 days of data. Which action should they take first?

Hard
77

Which THREE of the following are components of the OpenTelemetry project? (Select three)

Hard
78

Which TWO of the following are examples of context propagation mechanisms used in distributed tracing?

Hard
79

Which TWO of the following are valid Prometheus metric types? (Select two)

Medium
80

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

Medium
81

Which tool is specifically designed for distributed tracing and was originally developed by Uber?

Medium
82

What is the primary role of the OpenTelemetry Collector?

Medium
83

A company defines an SLO that 99.9% of requests to a service should complete in under 200ms. Which metric type is used to measure this SLO?

Hard
84

A DevOps team wants to collect and forward logs from all nodes in a Kubernetes cluster to a centralized logging backend. Which component is specifically designed for lightweight log collection and forwarding?

Medium

Frequently asked questions

What does the Cloud Native Observability domain cover on the KCNA exam?
Cloud concepts questions usually test the service model (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS) and deployment model (public/private/hybrid/community) appropriate for a given scenario.
How many questions are in this domain?
This page lists all 84 Cloud Native Observability questions in the KCNA question bank. The actual exam draws from this domain proportionally to its weighting in the official exam blueprint.
What is the best way to practise this domain?
Start with a short focused session (10 questions) to identify gaps, then work through explanations. Repeat with a longer session once the weak areas feel solid.
Can I practise only Cloud Native Observability questions?
Yes — the session launcher on this page filters questions to this domain only. Choose any session length for inline explanations and scoring.
cncf-kcna CNCF-KCNA kcna observability Practice Questions