Confluent CCAAK Sample Questions with Explanations

These original sample questions are designed to help you check how the exam topics appear in decision-style prompts. They are not taken from the live exam.

Use these sample questions as a guided self-assessment for Confluent Certified Administrator for Apache Kafka (CCAAK) topics such as brokers, partitions, replication, ISR, listeners, ACLs, monitoring, rolling maintenance, and cluster troubleshooting. The prompts emphasize safe operations rather than memorized broker settings.

Where these questions fit in the CCAAK guide

The sample set below is part of the Confluent CCAAK guide path:

• Confluent certification hub
• CCAAK exam guide
• CCAAK cheat sheet
• CCAAK study plan
• CCAAK FAQ
• CCAAK resources
• CCAAK glossary

CCAAK Kafka administrator sample questions

Work through each prompt before opening the explanation. CCAAK questions usually reward answers that protect durability, isolate the failure boundary, and use the lowest-risk operational fix.

Question 1

Topic: Under-replicated partitions

Monitoring shows a sudden increase in under-replicated partitions after one broker reports disk pressure. Producers are still writing, but latency has increased. What should the administrator do first?

• A. Ignore the alert because under-replicated partitions do not affect durability.
• B. Investigate broker health, disk usage, ISR status, and affected partitions before making a controlled remediation plan.
• C. Delete affected topics to clear the alert quickly.
• D. Disable replication so writes can proceed faster.

Best answer: B

Explanation: Under-replicated partitions are a durability and availability signal. The administrator should diagnose broker health and affected partitions before taking a risky action.

Why the other choices are weaker:

• A dismisses a serious cluster-health signal.
• C is destructive and not a normal remediation path.
• D weakens the core durability model.

What this tests: replication, ISR, broker health, disk pressure, monitoring, and operational triage.

Related topics: Replication; ISR; Monitoring; Broker health

Question 2

Topic: Listener misconfiguration

Internal clients can connect to Kafka, but external clients receive broker addresses they cannot route to after bootstrap. Which configuration area should the administrator check first?

• A. Advertised listeners and listener security protocol mapping for the external path.
• B. The topic retention policy, because retention controls client routing.
• C. The consumer group’s committed offsets.
• D. The number of records currently in the topic.

Best answer: A

Explanation: Kafka clients bootstrap and then use broker metadata. If advertised addresses are not reachable from the client’s network, connection failures appear after initial contact.

Why the other choices are weaker:

• B affects data retention, not broker address routing.
• C affects consumption position, not connectivity to brokers.
• D is unrelated to advertised connection metadata.

What this tests: advertised listeners, client routing, listener maps, internal and external connectivity, and broker metadata.

Related topics: Listeners; Networking; Connectivity; Broker metadata

Question 3

Topic: Rolling restart discipline

A configuration change requires broker restarts in a production Kafka cluster. The team wants to preserve availability and avoid unnecessary partition unavailability. Which approach is strongest?

• A. Restart all brokers at once so the maintenance window is short.
• B. Perform a controlled rolling restart, verify broker and partition health between nodes, and monitor ISR or offline partition signals.
• C. Stop all consumers permanently before restarting brokers.
• D. Reduce replication factor to one before maintenance to simplify the cluster.

Best answer: B

Explanation: Rolling maintenance preserves cluster availability better than stopping every broker. Health checks between restarts protect ISR and partition availability.

Why the other choices are weaker:

• A risks a full outage.
• C does not solve broker restart safety and disrupts consumers unnecessarily.
• D weakens durability before maintenance.

What this tests: rolling restarts, broker maintenance, availability, ISR health, and operational sequencing.

Related topics: Maintenance; Rolling restart; Availability; ISR

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