IBM Cloud Pak for Data v4.x Administrator Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

During a Cloud Pak for Data installation on an air-gapped OpenShift cluster, the installation fails with registry authentication errors for certain service images, while the platform foundation components installed successfully. Upon investigation, you discover that some service catalogs reference images from multiple registries. What is the MOST comprehensive approach to resolve this issue?

You are managing a multi-zone Cloud Pak for Data deployment where Watson Studio workloads are experiencing intermittent failures. Analysis shows that notebook runtime pods are being scheduled on nodes in availability zones different from their persistent volumes, causing connection timeouts. The cluster uses regional storage classes with WaitForFirstConsumer binding mode. What is the BEST solution to ensure pod-to-volume affinity?

After upgrading Cloud Pak for Data, several Watson Machine Learning deployments are failing with 'model loading timeout' errors. The control plane shows healthy, but observability data reveals that model pods are being OOMKilled during initialization despite having sufficient memory limits. Heap dumps show excessive metadata caching. What is the MOST effective solution?

Your organization requires integrating Cloud Pak for Data with an external identity provider using SAML 2.0 for SSO. After configuration, users can authenticate successfully, but they receive 'insufficient permissions' errors when accessing Watson Services despite being assigned to the correct user groups. LDAP sync is working, and group mappings appear correct in the platform. What is the MOST likely root cause and solution?

You need to perform an in-place upgrade of Cloud Pak for Data from version 4.5 to 4.8 in a production environment with multiple services deployed. Pre-upgrade validation reports indicate that two services (Watson Discovery and Watson OpenScale) have custom configurations that may not be compatible with the new version. What is the RECOMMENDED approach to minimize risk?

A Cloud Pak for Data deployment is experiencing performance degradation. Monitoring shows the zen-core pods are consuming excessive CPU during user authentication operations. Database query analysis reveals that the user authentication queries are performing full table scans on the user metadata table, which has grown to over 2 million records due to historical LDAP sync operations. What is the MOST appropriate remediation strategy?

Your organization is implementing a disaster recovery strategy for Cloud Pak for Data spanning two geographically distributed OpenShift clusters. The RTO requirement is 4 hours and RPO is 1 hour. The deployment includes Watson Studio, Watson Machine Learning, and DataStage with active production workloads. Which disaster recovery architecture provides the BEST balance of meeting requirements and operational efficiency?

After deploying Watson Knowledge Catalog, data asset governance policies are not being enforced on data virtualization queries. Users can access data through Data Virtualization that should be masked according to governance rules defined in WKC. Authentication works properly, and policies are marked as active. Investigation shows that the data classification and governance metadata is correctly defined in WKC. What is the MOST likely cause and solution?

A Cloud Pak for Data environment is experiencing intermittent zen-metastore-edb database connection exhaustion, causing platform operations to fail. Analysis shows connection pool size is configured at default values, and database metrics show peak connections reaching the configured maximum during normal business hours. However, connection duration analysis reveals many connections remain idle for extended periods. What combination of actions would MOST effectively resolve this issue?

You are planning a Cloud Pak for Data installation on a new OpenShift cluster that will support Watson Discovery with large document collections requiring NFS storage for persistent volumes. The infrastructure team has provided an NFS server with export configurations, but you need to ensure optimal performance and reliability. What configuration considerations are MOST critical for production Watson Discovery deployments?