EX280 · domain
Troubleshooting And Diagnostics
Practise Red Hat Certified OpenShift Administrator (EX280, OpenShift Container Platform 4.14+) (EX280) Troubleshooting And Diagnostics practice questions — original exam-style scenarios with answer choices, explanations, and analysis of common mistakes.
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What to know about Troubleshooting And Diagnostics
Troubleshooting And Diagnostics questions test whether you can apply the concept in context, not just recognise a definition.
How the topic appears in realistic exam-style scenarios.
Which detail in the question changes the correct answer.
How to eliminate plausible but wrong options.
How to connect the question back to the wider exam objective.
Watch out for
Common Troubleshooting And Diagnostics exam traps
- ▸Answering from memory before reading the full scenario.
- ▸Missing a constraint such as cost, availability, security, scope or command context.
- ▸Choosing a broad answer when the question asks for the most specific fix.
- ▸Ignoring why the wrong options are tempting.
Question index
All Troubleshooting And Diagnostics questions (69)
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An OpenShift cluster's SDN (OVN-Kubernetes) experiences packet loss between nodes. The administrator needs to inspect the Open vSwitch (OVS) flow tables on a specific worker node. How should they access the node to run 'ovs-ofctl dump-flows'?
Hard2An administrator wants to inspect cluster events filtered by warning type. Which TWO commands or techniques can help? (Choose TWO)
Easy3An administrator wants to view the logs of a specific container named 'backend' inside a pod with multiple containers. Which command should be used?
Easy4An administrator needs to verify which user account or service account they are currently logged into the OpenShift cluster with. Which command provides this information?
Easy5An administrator wants to check the resource requests and limits across all pods in a specific namespace. Which command provides this summary?
Easy6An administrator suspects that a memory leak in a system daemon on an RHCOS worker node is causing system instability. Which THREE commands or log sources can be examined via an oc debug node session to investigate system memory consumption? (Choose THREE)
Hard7An administrator wants to check the logs of the Cluster Version Operator to see why an upgrade failed. In which namespace does the CVO run?
Easy8An administrator is troubleshooting a deployment where pods fail to pull container images. Which TWO potential issues should be checked? (Choose TWO)
Easy9An administrator wants to check the exit code of a container that terminated earlier today in a pod that has since been restarted. Which command displays the previous termination details?
Easy10An OpenShift administrator observes that the 'authentication' ClusterOperator is reporting Available=False, Progressing=True, and Degraded=True. During troubleshooting, they notice that the kube-apiserver cannot validate tokens because the OAuth server routes are unreachable due to a misconfigured ingress controller. Which log collection method is best suited to pinpoint the OAuth metadata retrieval failure?
Hard11A cluster administrator suspects that an API rate-limiting issue is causing intermittent client timeouts. Which component logs should be inspected to confirm that clients are exceeding their API request limits?
Medium12An administrator needs to collect cluster-wide diagnostic information from an OpenShift 4.14 cluster for a Red Hat support case. Which command should be executed?
Easy13An OpenShift cluster experiences severe etcd latency spikes, causing leader elections to fail. Which metric or diagnostic tool should be used to inspect etcd peer round-trip times directly from the command line within the cluster?
Hard14An administrator needs to troubleshoot an application that fails to resolve internal cluster service names. They decide to run an interactive shell inside a temporary debugging pod with DNS tools installed. Which command creates this diagnostic pod?
Medium15An administrator needs to list all persistent volume claims in the cluster that are currently stuck in the 'Pending' state. Which command can be combined with grep or custom formatting to identify them?
Easy16An administrator is analyzing a severe networking issue where pod-to-pod communication across different worker nodes fails. Which THREE diagnostic utilities or commands should they execute inside an oc debug session on the nodes? (Choose THREE)
Hard17An administrator wants to check the cluster-wide resource consumption of nodes (CPU and Memory percentages). Which command provides this tabular overview?
Easy18A developer reports that their pod is unable to start because it cannot mount a persistent volume claim (PVC). Where should the administrator look to diagnose volume attachment issues related to the CSI driver?
Easy19A container inside a pod is failing with 'ImagePullBackOff'. The administrator verifies the image tag exists. What is the next most logical troubleshooting step to check authentication or registry access?
Medium20A pod fails to start with a 'CreateContainerConfigError' error message. What is the most common cause of this error that an administrator should investigate?
Medium21An administrator receives an alert that the Cluster Monitoring Operator is degraded because Prometheus cannot scrape metrics from a custom application namespace. Where should the administrator check to verify the ServiceMonitor configuration targeting the application?
Medium22A node in an OpenShift cluster goes into 'NotReady' status. The administrator uses 'oc debug node/<node-name>' to inspect the node's root filesystem. Where are the host's system logs mounted inside the debug chroot environment?
Hard23An administrator wants to check cluster networking and SDN communication. Which TWO commands can be used to gather network-related diagnostic information? (Choose TWO)
Easy24An application pod is experiencing intermittent network drops. The administrator wants to capture network packets passing through the pod's interface for analysis. Which tool can be used inside a debugging session attached to the pod namespace?
Medium25An administrator notices that the 'storage' ClusterOperator is degraded. Which TWO resources or logs should be inspected to diagnose the underlying CSI driver or provisioner failure? (Choose TWO)
Medium26A pod in the 'production' namespace is crashing repeatedly due to a segmentation fault in the application binary. The administrator needs to inspect the file system of the crashing container without altering the deployment spec permanently. Which command is most appropriate?
Medium27An administrator wants to check the status of all api-server instances in the cluster. Which TWO commands are helpful? (Choose TWO)
Easy28An OpenShift cluster's Ingress controller is failing to route external traffic because the router pods are crashing with 'Bind: address already in use'. What is the most likely cause that an administrator should investigate?
Hard29An administrator needs to drain a worker node safely for hardware maintenance, but some pods have local emptyDir storage that would be permanently deleted. Which flag must be added to the drain command to allow eviction of these pods?
Medium30An administrator needs to tail the logs of all pods with the label 'tier=frontend' across the current namespace. Which command should be used?
Easy31An administrator notices that the Cluster Version Operator (CVO) is blocked during an upgrade because a cluster operator is missing version annotations. Which command allows checking the current status and payload version of the CVO?
Medium32An administrator needs to check the cluster events across all namespaces sorted by timestamp to identify recent infrastructure warnings. Which command should they use?
Easy33An administrator observes that a specific node has high CPU utilization and wants to identify which processes or containers are consuming the most resources on that host directly. Which command-line tool executed inside an oc debug session on the node is best suited for interactive process monitoring?
Medium34A worker node's root filesystem reaches 100% capacity due to accumulated container images and logs, causing the kubelet to enter an eviction state. After freeing up disk space on the node, the administrator notices the node status remains NotReady. What action is required to clear the kubelet's node pressure condition?
Hard35During etcd troubleshooting, an administrator suspects quorum loss or follower synchronization issues. Which THREE commands or etcdctl actions performed inside an etcd pod can verify etcd health and cluster state? (Choose THREE)
Hard36An OpenShift cluster node is reporting High CPU and Memory pressure. Which THREE commands or tools can an administrator use to investigate resource bottlenecks on that node? (Choose THREE)
Hard37An application team reports that their application cannot connect to an external database due to a firewall blocking port 3306. The administrator wants to test network connectivity from inside a running application pod to the external database host. Which tool can they run using 'oc exec'?
Medium38An application pod is failing to write data because its mounted PersistentVolume is mounted as ReadOnly. The administrator checks the PVC definition and sees accessMode is set correctly to ReadWriteOnce. What is the most likely cause of the read-only mount?
Medium39The cluster monitoring stack is failing because Prometheus pods in the openshift-monitoring namespace are crashing due to disk space exhaustion on the Prometheus PersistentVolume. How can the administrator inspect the current disk usage inside the Prometheus container?
Hard40An administrator wants to view the last 50 lines of logs for a pod named 'api-server-xyz' and keep the stream open for new log entries. Which command should they use?
Easy41The 'dns' ClusterOperator is reporting Degraded=True because CoreDNS pods are failing health checks. The administrator suspects DNS request loops or upstream forwarding failures. Which log source is most effective for diagnosing CoreDNS resolution errors?
Hard42An administrator is investigating pod crash loops in a namespace. Which TWO commands are most useful for gathering initial diagnostic data about the crashing pods? (Choose TWO)
Easy43An administrator wants to verify node health and readiness across the cluster. Which TWO commands provide this information? (Choose TWO)
Easy44An administrator wants to stream logs from all pods belonging to a specific Deployment named 'web-frontend' in real-time. Which command achieves this?
Easy45During a troubleshooting session on a degraded cluster operator, an administrator finds that the operator's operand configuration is controlled by a Custom Resource (CR). Where is the most reliable place to look for error status messages reported by the operator controller loop regarding this CR?
Hard46An administrator needs to check the IP address and network status assigned to a running pod. Which command displays this information quickly?
Easy47An administrator needs to troubleshoot DNS resolution failures inside an application namespace. Which THREE resources or commands should they check? (Choose THREE)
Medium48An administrator needs to collect logs from all router pods in the 'openshift-ingress' namespace. Which TWO methods can achieve this? (Choose TWO)
Easy49An OpenShift cluster administrator notices that API requests are taking an excessively long time to complete. They suspect etcd database bloat due to excessive ConfigMap creations. Which etcd maintenance command can be run inside an etcd pod to reclaim storage space after compaction?
Hard50An OpenShift cluster upgrade has failed because a MachineConfigPool is degraded. Which THREE actions or commands can an administrator perform to diagnose the root cause of the MachineConfigPool degradation? (Choose THREE)
Hard51An application pod is failing its liveness probe and continuously restarting. Where can an administrator quickly check the reason for the liveness probe failure?
Easy52A pod is stuck in the 'ContainerCreating' state for an extended period. The administrator suspects a persistent volume mount timeout. Which resource events should they examine to confirm if the volume plugin is failing to attach the disk?
Medium53An OpenShift cluster node has experienced kernel panics due to a faulty third-party kernel module. The administrator needs to review the kernel crash logs (vmcore or kdump logs) stored on the node. Where are these logs typically written on a CoreOS worker node?
Hard54An administrator needs to troubleshoot why an OLM (Operator Lifecycle Manager) managed operator installation is failing. Which THREE resources should be inspected? (Choose THREE)
Medium55An administrator notices that the Ingress Operator is failing to deploy routers because of a persistent validation error in the Default IngressController resource. How can the administrator inspect the exact validation schema failure reported by the operator?
Hard56An administrator is diagnosing why an authentication token exchange is failing for cluster users. Which THREE sources provide relevant error logs and status information? (Choose THREE)
Medium57An administrator wants to verify if all required cluster operators are available and not degraded after an installation. Which command provides this summary?
Easy58An administrator wants to check the detailed configuration and current status of a specific Route named 'my-app-route'. Which command provides this?
Easy59An administrator is troubleshooting a certificate expiration issue that has broken communication between the kubelet and the API server. Where are the kubelet client certificates stored on a worker node that can be inspected via an oc debug session?
Medium60An OpenShift cluster experiences intermittent API server timeouts. Which THREE log sources or diagnostic commands should an administrator analyze to identify API server performance bottlenecks? (Choose THREE)
Hard61An administrator is troubleshooting a certificate signing request (CSR) that is stuck in the Pending state for a newly added worker node. Which command should they use to approve the pending CSR?
Hard62The OpenShift SDN (or OVN-Kubernetes) network plugin reports a failure. The administrator needs to inspect the iptables rules on a worker node to verify packet mangling and NAT configurations. How can they view the host's iptables rules?
Hard63An administrator notices that a node is marked as 'SchedulingDisabled' (Cordoned). Which command should be executed to allow pods to be scheduled on this node again?
Medium64An application pod is running, but HTTP requests to the service are returning '502 Bad Gateway'. The administrator wants to check if the endpoints controller has populated the Service with active pod IP addresses. Which command verifies this?
Medium65An OpenShift cluster operator is stuck in a Progressing state during an update. Which THREE diagnostic steps help determine why the operator reconciliation loop is blocked? (Choose THREE)
Hard66An administrator is troubleshooting a failing MachineConfig update in an OpenShift cluster. The MachineConfigPool 'worker' is degraded and reports that a node is failing to apply the rendered-worker configuration. Which log stream is critical for determining why the Machine Config Daemon failed to update system files on the target node?
Hard67An administrator notices that a node has been automatically cordoned and drained by the cluster. Which THREE places should the administrator inspect to find the reason for the node eviction or failure? (Choose THREE)
Medium68An OpenShift administrator needs to investigate a pod that is failing with an 'OOMKilled' exit code. Which command reveals the memory limit configuration and historical usage right before the crash?
Medium69An OpenShift cluster administrator receives an alert that etcd disk fsync durations are excessively high. Which performance metric is the etcd diagnostic tool measuring when evaluating disk latency?
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Frequently asked questions
- What does the Troubleshooting And Diagnostics domain cover on the EX280 exam?
- Troubleshooting And Diagnostics questions test whether you can apply the concept in context, not just recognise a definition.
- How many questions are in this domain?
- This page lists all 69 Troubleshooting And Diagnostics questions in the EX280 question bank. The actual exam draws from this domain proportionally to its weighting in the official exam blueprint.
- What is the best way to practise this domain?
- Start with a short focused session (10 questions) to identify gaps, then work through explanations. Repeat with a longer session once the weak areas feel solid.
- Can I practise only Troubleshooting And Diagnostics questions?
- Yes — the session launcher on this page filters questions to this domain only. Choose any session length for inline explanations and scoring.