A team is implementing distributed tracing for a system that handles high traffic. They are concerned about the overhead of tracing on performance. Which strategy is most effective to reduce overhead while still capturing useful traces?

Use a tracing backend that stores traces in memory only.

Enable sampling, such as head-based sampling, to collect a representative subset of traces.

Increase the number of spans per trace to capture more detail.

Disable tracing for all services except the most critical one.

A site reliability engineer (SRE) wants to alert when the 95th percentile of API response time exceeds 500ms over a 5-minute window. Which Prometheus metric type and query would best support this alert?

Use a Summary metric and query summary_quantile(0.95, http_request_duration_seconds)

Use a Gauge metric that stores the average response time and alert when it exceeds 500ms.

Use a Counter metric that increments with each request and alert when the rate exceeds a threshold.

Use a Histogram metric and a query like histogram_quantile(0.95, sum(rate(http_request_duration_seconds_bucket[5m])) by (le))

What is a trace span in distributed tracing?

A metric that counts the number of requests per second

A log message that records an error in a service

A single unit of work within a trace, representing one operation in a service

The entire journey of a request across all services

A DevOps team uses Prometheus to monitor a web application. They want to track the total number of HTTP requests received since the application started, and they also want to track the current number of active sessions. Which Prometheus metric types should they use for each?

Gauge for requests, Counter for active sessions

Counter for requests, Gauge for active sessions

Histogram for requests, Gauge for active sessions

Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA)

Domain 3Objective 3

Observability KCNA Practice Questions (Page 1)

Part of the Cloud Native Application Delivery domain, which accounts for 16% of the KCNA exam. Linux Foundation does not publish an official question count, but from its 90-minute exam (~35–60 total, ~6–10 in this domain), expect 2–3 from this objective — we provide 31 practice questions to prepare you well beyond it. (estimate)

31questions here

7free pages

7concepts

16%of the exam

Questions 1–5

1expert · hard
A team is implementing distributed tracing for a system that handles high traffic. They are concerned about the overhead of tracing on performance. Which strategy is most effective to reduce overhead while still capturing useful traces?
Select an answer first
2application · medium
A site reliability engineer (SRE) wants to alert when the 95th percentile of API response time exceeds 500ms over a 5-minute window. Which Prometheus metric type and query would best support this alert?
Select an answer first
3foundation · easy
What is a trace span in distributed tracing?
Select an answer first
4foundation · easy
Which metric type is appropriate for measuring a value that can go up and down, such as the current number of active connections to a database?
Select an answer first
5application · medium
A DevOps team uses Prometheus to monitor a web application. They want to track the total number of HTTP requests received since the application started, and they also want to track the current number of active sessions. Which Prometheus metric types should they use for each?
Select an answer first

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