This CV0-004 practice question tests your understanding of operations and support. The scenario asks you to isolate a root cause — eliminate options that address a different problem before choosing. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
A company runs a web application on three virtual machines behind a load balancer. During a traffic spike, one VM becomes unresponsive. The load balancer continues sending traffic to it, causing errors. Which configuration change would prevent this issue in the future?
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Configure health checks on the load balancer.
Health checks allow the load balancer to periodically probe the status of each backend VM (e.g., via HTTP GET or TCP SYN). If a VM fails a configurable number of consecutive checks, the load balancer automatically marks it as unhealthy and stops routing traffic to it, preventing errors during a spike. This is the standard mechanism in AWS ELB, Azure Load Balancer, and HAProxy to detect and isolate failed instances.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
✗
Set a longer connection timeout on the load balancer.
Why it's wrong here
Timeout affects idle connections, not health detection.
✓
Configure health checks on the load balancer.
Why this is correct
Health checks automatically remove unhealthy VMs from the pool.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
Increase the number of VMs to five.
Why it's wrong here
More VMs help distribute load but do not prevent traffic to a failed VM.
✗
Change the load balancing algorithm to round-robin.
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
CompTIA often tests the misconception that simply adding more servers or changing the algorithm solves availability issues, when in fact without health checks the load balancer has no mechanism to detect and avoid failed instances.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Health checks typically use a configurable interval (e.g., 5 seconds), a threshold for consecutive failures (e.g., 2), and a timeout (e.g., 3 seconds). Under the hood, the load balancer maintains a state table per backend; when a VM fails health checks, it is removed from the active rotation until it passes checks again. In real-world scenarios, health checks can also validate application-layer responses (e.g., checking for a 200 OK on /health), which catches issues like a hung web server process that still accepts TCP connections.
KKey Concepts to Remember
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
TExam Day Tips
→Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
→Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
A practitioner preparing for the CV0-004 exam encounters this exact type of scenario on the job. The correct answer here is not the most general option — it is the best answer for the specific constraint described. Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option. Real exam questions reward reading the full scenario before eliminating options, because the constraint defines which answer fits.
What to study next
Got this wrong? Here's your next step.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Operations and Support — This question tests Operations and Support — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Configure health checks on the load balancer. — Health checks allow the load balancer to periodically probe the status of each backend VM (e.g., via HTTP GET or TCP SYN). If a VM fails a configurable number of consecutive checks, the load balancer automatically marks it as unhealthy and stops routing traffic to it, preventing errors during a spike. This is the standard mechanism in AWS ELB, Azure Load Balancer, and HAProxy to detect and isolate failed instances.
What should I do if I get this CV0-004 question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Question Discussion
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