Free Practice Questions for Confluent CCDAK Exam

With acks=all, the leader waits for min.insync.replicas to acknowledge the message. Since min.insync.replicas=3, Kafka will only commit the message once 3 brokers (leader + 2 followers) confirm they have the message.

From Kafka Documentation > Acks and Durability:

“If acks=all is specified, the producer will wait until the full set of in-sync replicas has acknowledged the record. The minimum number of in-sync replicas is controlled by min.insync.replicas.”

Even though the replication factor is 4, only 3 acknowledgments are needed, as defined by min.insync.replicas.

Increasing tasks.max allows the connector to create multiple tasks, each responsible for processing different tables or table partitions. If only one task is used, adding more workers has no effect.

From Kafka Connect JDBC Connector Docs:

“Use tasks.max to configure how many tasks are created for the connector. Each task can process a subset of the data.”

A and C help only if the bottleneck is in Kafka, not Connect.

D is a large architectural change, not the first step.

The bootstrap.servers setting is used by clients (producers and consumers) to initially connect to the Kafka cluster. It does not need to list all brokers—just a few that are up and reachable. The client will then use the cluster metadata to discover the full broker list.

From Kafka Java Client Configuration Docs:

“This is a list of host/port pairs to use for establishing the initial connection to the Kafka cluster. The client will make use of all servers irrespective of which servers are specified here for bootstrapping.”

Hence, listing multiple brokers provides redundancy and fault tolerance in the event one is down during client startup.

For proper delivery handling with acks=all:

Use callback to log or act on success/failure.

Use try/catch to handle synchronous exceptions like serialization errors or network failures.

From Kafka Producer Documentation:

“Errors can be caught either via the returned Future or via the callback interface. For fatal errors, use a try/catch block around the send call.”

Option B is incorrect because send() returns a Future, not RecordMetadata directly.

Option D is invalid — ProducerRecord has no method called status().

Increasing partitions increases parallelism, but also means:

Consumers in a group may have to handle more partitions, especially if the number of consumers is lower than the number of partitions.

This can result in increased lag, especially under high load.

From Kafka Topic Management Docs:

“Increasing the number of partitions increases consumer work, and if consumers can’t keep up, lag can accumulate.”

A is false: existing data is not redistributed.

B is false: records with the same key always map to the same partition based on hash.

D is not directly impacted by the partition count.

The Apache Kafka monitoring and operations documentation highlights several controller-level metrics that are critical indicators of cluster health.

ActiveControllerCount must always be 1 in a healthy cluster. A value of 0 indicates no active controller, while values greater than 1 indicate a serious split-brain condition. This metric is fundamental for cluster stability.

OfflinePartitionsCount is one of the most important health metrics. Any value greater than 0 means that some partitions have no available leader, making them unavailable for producers and consumers. This directly indicates a degraded or unhealthy cluster.

UncleanLeaderElectionsPerSec tracks the rate of unclean leader elections. Unclean elections can cause data loss, and any non-zero value is a strong signal of broker failures or misconfiguration and should immediately trigger alerts.

The remaining options are not minimum health indicators. LastCommittedRecordOffset is not a standard health metric, and TopicsToDeleteCount only indicates pending administrative operations, not cluster instability.

Therefore, the three minimum and officially recommended broker metrics for monitoring Kafka cluster health are UncleanLeaderElectionsPerSec, ActiveControllerCount, and OfflinePartitionsCount.

A 409 Conflict response in Kafka Connect REST API usually means:

The connector name provided already exists (i.e., a connector with that name is already deployed).

The Kafka Connect cluster is temporarily unavailable to accept new tasks due to a rebalance in progress.

From the Confluent Developer documentation and Kafka Connect REST API spec:

“409 – Conflict. The connector name is already in use or the worker group is in the process of rebalancing and cannot complete the request at this time.”

Option A is incorrect because invalid configurations return 400 Bad Request, not 409.

Option B is invalid because Kafka Connect does not have a strict concept of "capacity" that prevents connector creation with a 409.

If the application is CPU-bound and lagging, adding more consumers to the group will allow better parallel processing, especially since the topic has 4 partitions, allowing up to 4 active consumers.

From Kafka Consumer Group Docs:

“Kafka achieves parallelism by distributing partitions across consumers in a group. Adding consumers helps reduce lag if partitions are underutilized.”

B may help but requires repartitioning and coordination.

C or D affects how much data is polled, not how fast it’s processed.

According to the official Apache Kafka Connect REST API documentation, restarting a connector can be done at different granularities: connector-level, task-level, or both. By default, calling POST /connectors/{name}/restart only restarts the connector instance, not its tasks.

To restart the connector and all of its tasks, the request must explicitly include the query parameter includeTasks=true. This instructs Kafka Connect to restart the connector and all associated tasks, regardless of whether they are currently running or failed.

Option B (onlyFailed=true) limits the restart to only failed tasks, which does not meet the requirement to restart all tasks. Option C restarts only the connector instance, leaving tasks untouched. Option D restarts a single specific task and does not restart the connector itself.

Therefore, the correct and officially documented REST request to restart the connector instance and all tasks is:

POST /connectors/s3-connector/restart?includeTasks=true

This ensures a full restart of the connector and its execution context across the Kafka Connect cluster.