CV0-004 Operations and Support Practice Question
A cloud operations team manages a three-tier application on Google Cloud. After a deployment, users report intermittent 503 errors from the HTTP(S) load balancer, and backend health checks are flapping between healthy and unhealthy. The team suspects the backend instances are being overwhelmed during health check bursts. Which TWO actions should the team take to stabilize the health checks and reduce false failures? (Choose two.)
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is treating health check flapping as a capacity or caching problem, when the direct fix is adjusting probe interval, timeout, and consecutive-result thresholds.
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
✓
Increase the health check's check interval and timeout settings so probes are less frequent and tolerate brief slowdowns.
Health check flapping during bursts is addressed by tuning the probe itself: a longer interval and timeout reduce probe intensity and tolerate brief slowdowns, while higher healthy and unhealthy thresholds require more consistent evidence before an instance's state changes. Together these settings distinguish transient latency from genuine failure. Caching, changing load balancer type, or removing instances do not reduce false health check failures.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Increase the health check's check interval and timeout settings so probes are less frequent and tolerate brief slowdowns.
Why this is correct
Lengthening the interval and timeout gives backends more time to respond and reduces the probe rate that may be contributing to the flapping. It does not mask a truly failed instance, because consecutive failures are still required, but it prevents transient latency spikes from marking healthy instances as unhealthy during bursts.
- ✗
Reduce the number of backend instances in the instance group so each instance receives fewer health check probes.
Why it's wrong here
Removing instances lowers total capacity and concentrates user traffic on fewer backends, which worsens saturation and increases the chance of real failures. Health checks still probe every remaining instance at the configured rate, so this does not reduce the per-instance probe burden and risks making the outage worse.
- ✗
Enable Cloud CDN on the backend service so cached responses absorb the health check traffic.
Why it's wrong here
Cloud CDN caches user content at edge locations and does not serve or intercept load balancer health check probes, which originate from Google's health check ranges and go directly to backends. Enabling it may improve user latency but will not reduce the probe load or stop the health state from flapping.
- ✗
Switch the backend service to use a network load balancer instead of the HTTP(S) load balancer.
Why it's wrong here
Changing the load balancer type changes protocol handling and termination but does not address the probe behavior causing flapping, and network load balancers also perform health checking. It also removes layer 7 features the application may rely on, so it is a disruptive change that does not resolve the underlying issue.
- ✓
Configure a longer healthy threshold and unhealthy threshold on the health check to require more consecutive successes and failures.
Why this is correct
Adjusting the thresholds changes how many consecutive probe results are needed to flip an instance's state. A higher unhealthy threshold prevents a single slow or dropped probe from removing an instance from rotation, and a higher healthy threshold avoids prematurely returning an instance that is still recovering, smoothing the flapping.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official CompTIA exam blueprint
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