50 IBM Cloud Pak for Data v4.x Administrator Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

An administrator must grant a group of data engineers permission to create projects and manage assets in Cloud Pak for Data, but they should not be able to change cluster-wide settings. Which role assignment best meets this requirement?

During initial installation planning, an organization requires that application ingress routes be accessible only within the corporate network. Which approach best satisfies this requirement on OpenShift for Cloud Pak for Data?

A team reports they cannot see a newly provisioned Cloud Pak for Data service instance in the web console, but the operator shows the CR is Ready. What is the most likely administrative cause?

Which statement best describes the primary purpose of Cloud Pak for Data projects from an administration perspective?

After an upgrade, several pods are stuck in ImagePullBackOff for multiple Cloud Pak for Data services. Other workloads in the cluster can pull images successfully. What is the best first check to isolate the issue?

An administrator needs to ensure that a specific Cloud Pak for Data service can only schedule pods on nodes labeled for data workloads, while other services can use general worker nodes. What is the recommended Kubernetes/OpenShift mechanism to implement this?

A Cloud Pak for Data administrator is asked to provide a consistent, governed way for users to access a DB2 database without sharing individual database credentials in notebooks. Which approach is most appropriate?

A service instance fails to start after a configuration change. The operator status shows reconciliation errors, and the pods are repeatedly recreated. What is the best next step to identify the root cause?

A Cloud Pak for Data cluster uses multiple storage backends. A stateful data service requires ReadWriteMany (RWX) access for shared components, but provisioning fails because the default storage class only supports ReadWriteOnce (RWO). What should the administrator do?

Users report intermittent slow performance when browsing projects and opening assets. Monitoring shows high API request latency on the OpenShift control plane is not the issue. Which action is most likely to improve responsiveness at the platform level?

An administrator needs to verify that the IBM Cloud Pak for Data web client is reachable through the cluster ingress and that the route uses the correct TLS certificate. Which OpenShift resource should the administrator inspect first?

A new team is onboarding to Cloud Pak for Data. The security team requires that users authenticate using the enterprise identity provider and be placed into appropriate roles without manually adding each user. What is the recommended approach?

A platform administrator wants to confirm that storage is correctly provisioned for Cloud Pak for Data workloads and that pods can dynamically request storage. Which Kubernetes concept is most directly responsible for enabling dynamic provisioning?

After applying a change to limit CPU usage for a set of Cloud Pak for Data workloads, multiple pods are stuck in Pending state with events indicating insufficient CPU. What is the most appropriate remediation to restore service while preserving governance controls?

A data service instance fails to start after an upgrade. The service pods show image pull errors, but the OpenShift cluster can reach external registries only through an internal mirror. Which configuration is most likely missing or incorrect?

An administrator must delegate day-to-day management of projects (spaces/projects, adding members, and assigning roles) to a data steward team without granting cluster-admin privileges. What is the best approach?

A team reports that scheduled jobs in a Cloud Pak for Data service are failing intermittently, and logs suggest the jobs cannot write temporary files. PVCs are bound and have capacity available. What is the most likely cause?

A platform administrator is asked to implement a standardized way to rotate credentials used by a Cloud Pak for Data service to access an external database, without rebuilding container images. Which approach is recommended?

During peak hours, users experience slow responses in the Cloud Pak for Data UI and API. Cluster node utilization is moderate, but the platform’s ingress pods show high CPU and request latency. What is the most appropriate optimization action?

A regulated enterprise requires that only specific Cloud Pak for Data services be allowed to communicate with an external object storage endpoint, while all other workloads must be denied by default. Which design best meets this requirement on OpenShift?

After deploying Cloud Pak for Data, an administrator needs to allow end users to access the web client from outside the cluster using a stable DNS name and TLS. Which component is typically used to expose the CPD web endpoint?

A platform admin wants to delegate day-to-day user onboarding to a separate team without granting cluster-admin privileges. What is the best-practice approach in Cloud Pak for Data?

A DataStage service instance is failing shortly after start, and users report that job runs cannot write to the project storage. Which issue is the most likely cause?

A new CPD environment requires strict network segmentation. Only the CPD web client and API endpoints should be reachable from the corporate network; internal service-to-service traffic must remain restricted. Which approach best supports this requirement?

An admin needs to enable a new data service for a line of business, but the security team requires that pods run with least privilege and no custom privileged containers. What should the admin verify first before enabling the service?

Users report that CPD is slow during business hours. Cluster monitoring shows CPU throttling on multiple CPD pods, but there is still unused CPU capacity on nodes. What is the most likely cause?

A platform admin must ensure that CPD backups capture the platform configuration and metadata needed to recover the control plane after a disaster. What is the best-practice focus for this requirement?

A CPD administrator needs to troubleshoot a service installation that is stuck in a 'Pending' state. Pods show 'FailedScheduling' events referencing 'Insufficient memory' even though the cluster has free memory overall. What is the most likely explanation?

A regulated enterprise requires that CPD workloads are isolated from general OpenShift workloads and that only dedicated nodes run CPD pods. Which design best meets this requirement?

An admin observes frequent restarts of a CPD microservice. `oc describe pod` shows the container is failing readiness probes, while liveness probes succeed. Users intermittently see errors when calling the service. What is the best next action to stabilize and diagnose the issue?

After deploying IBM Cloud Pak for Data on OpenShift, an administrator wants to provide users with a stable URL that remains valid even if underlying router pods change. Which OpenShift resource is typically used to expose the Cloud Pak for Data web endpoint externally?

A Cloud Pak for Data administrator needs to allow the platform operators to run with the required permissions while following Kubernetes best practices. Which mechanism should be used to grant the operators the permissions they need in a controlled way?

Users report they cannot log in to Cloud Pak for Data after the identity provider configuration was updated. The administrator suspects the platform is unable to retrieve updated configuration from the cluster. Which OpenShift object most commonly stores configuration values that platform components read at runtime?

An administrator is asked to verify that a new storage class will work for Cloud Pak for Data workloads that require persistent storage. What is the most appropriate first validation step before onboarding production workloads?

A team needs to isolate Cloud Pak for Data workloads so that only specific worker nodes are used for data services pods. Which approach best meets this requirement in OpenShift?

During a planned maintenance window, the administrator must temporarily stop a specific Cloud Pak for Data service from consuming resources while keeping the rest of the platform available. What is the best administrative action in OpenShift?

Cloud Pak for Data pods are repeatedly being evicted, and events show the node is under memory pressure. The administrator needs to confirm the root cause using OpenShift-native data. Which step is most appropriate?

A data services operator reports that a service instance is stuck in a "provisioning" state even though the underlying pods are running. The administrator wants to determine whether the operator is failing reconciliation due to missing permissions. What is the best place to start?

A security team requires that all sensitive configuration values used by Cloud Pak for Data components (such as credentials and tokens) are stored encrypted and not visible in plain text in manifests. Which Kubernetes/OpenShift object should be used for these values?

A Cloud Pak for Data deployment must support disaster recovery. The platform uses persistent volumes for user projects and service metadata. Which design choice best supports DR while minimizing data inconsistency risk?

An administrator needs to verify that a newly installed Cloud Pak for Data instance is ready for users. Which check is the BEST first indicator that the platform control plane is healthy?

A security team requires that Cloud Pak for Data user authentication be centrally managed and support single sign-on. Which approach is MOST appropriate?

A Cloud Pak for Data service instance fails to start after deployment. The administrator suspects insufficient CPU and memory on the cluster. What is the BEST first step to confirm this hypothesis?

A company must isolate workloads so that a data science team cannot view or affect another team’s Cloud Pak for Data resources. Which design is MOST aligned with best practices on OpenShift?

An administrator needs to ensure that Cloud Pak for Data storage supports both high I/O performance for databases and shared access for some analytics workloads. Which approach is MOST appropriate?

A platform admin wants to limit which container images can be used by Cloud Pak for Data workloads to meet compliance requirements. Which OpenShift capability BEST supports this requirement?

A Cloud Pak for Data upgrade completes, but certain service pods repeatedly crash with configuration errors. The admin needs to identify whether a configuration override or custom setting is causing the issue. What is the BEST action?

A data governance team wants sensitive columns masked for most users while allowing a limited group to see full values in analytics tools. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability BEST addresses this requirement?

A highly regulated organization requires end-to-end encryption for data at rest used by Cloud Pak for Data services, with customer-managed keys. Which architecture is MOST appropriate?

After enabling autoscaling, Cloud Pak for Data experiences intermittent timeouts during peak usage. Metrics show that new pods start slowly due to image pulls and node provisioning delays. What is the BEST optimization to reduce user-facing latency?