XSOAR Engineer Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

You are designing a multi-tenant Cortex XSOAR deployment for a managed security provider. Each tenant must have strict data separation, unique integrations/credentials, and separate analyst teams. However, the provider also wants to centrally maintain a common library of playbooks and automations that can be promoted across tenants with minimal drift. Which architecture best meets these requirements while minimizing operational overhead?

An XSOAR deployment uses remote engines to reach on-prem systems. After a firewall change, several integrations intermittently fail with timeouts only during peak hours. The engine shows as connected, but commands to one internal REST service frequently fail while others succeed. You suspect a network device is silently dropping long-lived connections and causing TCP resets. Which approach is most appropriate to confirm the root cause and mitigate it in an enterprise-safe way?

A security team uses a single playbook to process thousands of incidents per day. The playbook enriches IOCs, then loops over indicators to run multiple reputation commands across several integrations. During bursts, the playbook frequently hits integration rate limits and causes incident processing backlogs. You must redesign for high throughput while preserving enrichment quality. Which solution is the best practice approach in XSOAR?

A playbook uses a conditional task that checks whether an incident field "Business Impact" equals "High". Analysts report that the playbook sometimes takes the wrong branch even though the field visually shows "High" in the layout. Investigation reveals the field is a drop-down with display values and stored values, and historical incidents used a different mapping. What is the most robust fix to prevent branching errors across current and historical data?

Your incident ingestion creates one incident per alert. You need to group related alerts into a single incident using a deterministic key and update the existing incident if new matching alerts arrive. Additionally, you must prevent race conditions where two matching alerts arriving simultaneously create two separate incidents. Which approach best satisfies these requirements in XSOAR?

A custom automation script updates an incident field, then triggers another playbook via a command. In production, you observe sporadic cases where the downstream playbook reads the old value. No errors appear in the war room. What is the most likely cause and the best mitigation?

You are onboarding a SaaS security product via API. The vendor enforces strict per-tenant rate limits and provides a "cursor" for incremental retrieval. You must ensure no events are missed, duplicates are minimized, and backfills are possible without reprocessing the entire history. Which design is most appropriate in XSOAR?

You ingest indicators from two threat intel sources: Source A is highly reliable but updates slowly; Source B updates frequently but has higher false positives. You want XSOAR to prioritize A when conflicts exist, retain B's sightings for investigation, and prevent B from overriding A's reputation/confidence when both report on the same indicator. What is the best approach?

After onboarding a new integration, commands work in the integration instance 'Test' but fail in the production instance with "Forbidden". Both use the same API key. The only difference is that production uses a proxy and a remote engine, while 'Test' runs directly from the XSOAR server. DNS resolution from the engine works, and TCP connectivity to the proxy is open. What is the most probable issue and the next best troubleshooting step?

In production, analysts report that a complex playbook occasionally stalls for hours without errors. Tasks show as 'running' even though underlying integrations are responsive. This happens more often when many incidents run concurrently. You suspect a resource contention or job execution bottleneck. Which set of actions is most appropriate to diagnose and remediate the issue while preserving reliability?