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 load test, the team notices that healthy targets are being marked unhealthy and removed from rotation whenever a deployment briefly pushes CPU utilization above 90 percent. The team wants the load balancer to remove an instance only when the application stops responding to HTTP requests, not when it is merely busy. Which action should the team take?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming that a busy instance is an unhealthy instance, when load balancer health checks are meant to verify application responsiveness rather than resource utilization.
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
✓
Configure the target group health check to use the HTTP protocol on the application's health endpoint with a matcher for 200 and increase the unhealthy threshold.
Health checks should reflect the actual availability of the application, not incidental resource pressure. Switching the target group to an HTTP check against a dedicated health endpoint, expecting a 200 response, and lengthening the unhealthy threshold lets the load balancer distinguish a genuinely unresponsive target from one that is simply handling heavy load. This keeps instances in service during short CPU spikes, which is exactly the deployment behavior the team wants to preserve.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Enable sticky sessions on the load balancer so that clients remain bound to the same instance throughout the deployment.
Why it's wrong here
Sticky sessions control how requests are routed to targets; they do not influence the health check process that marks targets unhealthy. Enabling them would keep clients pinned to an instance that could still be deregistered, potentially worsening the user experience. This option addresses session affinity, which is unrelated to detecting application responsiveness during CPU saturation.
- ✗
Create a CloudWatch alarm on the CPUUtilization metric and attach it to an Auto Scaling group scaling policy to replace instances above 90 percent.
Why it's wrong here
Replacing instances because of high CPU treats a capacity symptom as a failure and would terminate healthy, productive targets during a load test. It does not change how the load balancer decides health, so the original problem of busy instances being removed from rotation persists. Scaling out based on CPU is a valid capacity tactic, but it is not the fix requested here.
- ✓
Configure the target group health check to use the HTTP protocol on the application's health endpoint with a matcher for 200 and increase the unhealthy threshold.
Why this is correct
An HTTP health check against a dedicated application health endpoint evaluates whether the application is actually serving requests, which is the behavior the team wants. Setting a matcher of 200 confirms a valid response, and raising the unhealthy threshold prevents a single slow response from ejecting a target. Because CPU pressure alone does not affect an HTTP health check, busy-but-responsive instances stay in rotation during deployments.
- ✗
Change the target group health check to TCP on the instance port and raise the healthy threshold so instances rejoin faster.
Why it's wrong here
A TCP health check only confirms that something is listening on the port, not that the application is answering HTTP requests correctly. It would mark a hung process that still holds the socket open as healthy, which is the opposite of the desired behavior. Raising the healthy threshold also slows re-registration rather than addressing the false unhealthy removal caused by CPU spikes.
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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.