CV0-004 Operations and Support Practice Question
A cloud operations team runs a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. During a recent incident, the team discovered that a single unhealthy instance continued to receive traffic for several minutes before being removed. The team wants to reduce the time it takes for the load balancer to detect and stop routing traffic to unhealthy targets. Which action should the administrator take to meet this requirement?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming that connection draining or session affinity settings control how quickly the load balancer notices an unhealthy target.
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
✓
Reduce the health check interval and unhealthy threshold in the target group health check settings.
Health check behavior for an Application Load Balancer target group is governed by the interval, timeout, healthy threshold, and unhealthy threshold. Lowering the interval and reducing the number of consecutive failures required to mark a target unhealthy shortens detection time, which directly addresses the requirement to remove unhealthy instances from rotation faster.
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 deregistration delay so connections drain gracefully before instances are removed.
Why it's wrong here
The deregistration delay, or connection draining, controls how long the load balancer waits for in-flight requests to complete before removing a target. Increasing it delays removal rather than speeding up detection. It affects graceful shutdown, not the speed at which health checks identify and react to an unhealthy target.
- ✓
Reduce the health check interval and unhealthy threshold in the target group health check settings.
Why this is correct
The target group health check settings control how frequently the load balancer probes targets and how many consecutive failures mark a target unhealthy. Shortening the interval and lowering the unhealthy threshold reduces detection latency, so unhealthy instances are removed from rotation faster. This directly addresses the scenario where an unhealthy instance kept receiving traffic for several minutes.
- ✗
Change the load balancer scheme from internet-facing to internal to reduce probe latency.
Why it's wrong here
The load balancer scheme determines whether the load balancer is reachable from the internet or only within the VPC. It has no bearing on the frequency or threshold of health checks. Changing the scheme would affect accessibility and routing topology, not the speed at which unhealthy targets are detected and removed.
- ✗
Enable sticky sessions on the target group so clients remain bound to a single healthy instance.
Why it's wrong here
Sticky sessions, or session affinity, keep a client bound to the same target for the duration of a session. This does not improve health detection and can actually worsen the user impact, because clients pinned to an unhealthy target may continue to be routed to it until the session ends. It does not reduce the time to detect an unhealthy instance.
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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
This CV0-004 practice question is part of Courseiva's free CompTIA 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 CV0-004 exam.