NSE7 HA Election Practice Question
An administrator is troubleshooting a split-brain situation in an HA cluster. They run 'get system ha status' and see that both FortiGates report themselves as primary. Which command should they run to force the secondary unit to take over as primary?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse 'diagnose sys ha reset-uptime' with a command that directly forces a role change, when in reality it manipulates the uptime tiebreaker to indirectly influence the election process after a failover event.
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
✓
diagnose sys ha reset-uptime
'diagnose sys ha reset-uptime' resets the HA uptime counter on the local unit. In Fortinet HA, during a split-brain, both units have the same priority and uptime may be a tiebreaker. To force the secondary to become primary, the administrator should run this command on the current primary to reset its uptime counter to zero. This makes the secondary's uptime higher, so when the next HA election occurs (e.g., after a link flap or manual trigger), the secondary will be elected as the new primary, resolving the split-brain condition.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
execute ha failover
Why it's wrong here
This command does not exist.
- ✗
reboot the primary unit
Why it's wrong here
This would work but is disruptive and not a command to force failover without reboot.
- ✓
diagnose sys ha reset-uptime
Why this is correct
Resets the uptime, which can trigger a priority re-evaluation and failover.
- ✗
diagnose sys ha stop
Why it's wrong here
Stops HA on the unit, not failover.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This NSE7 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Fortinet 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 NSE7 exam.