500-420 Practice Questions
Prepare for 500-420 with more than an answer.
- Exam fee
- $300 USD
- Level
- Associate
- Valid for
- 3 years
Domains covered on the exam 5
- Agents and Application Performance20%
- Troubleshooting15%
- Business Transactions20%
- Health Rules, Dashboards, and Snapshots20%
- Collectors, Information Points, and Service Endpoints25%
- 1
An application is experiencing intermittent stalls, but the transaction snapshots are not providing enough detail because the stalls happen between method calls. The analyst needs to see exactly where time is being spent within a specific method during a transaction. What snapshot analysis feature should be used?
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Correct answer: B
The 'Hot Spots' view within a transaction snapshot provides a line-by-line analysis of code execution time for the most expensive methods. It helps pinpoint the exact lines of code within a method that are consuming the most time, which is ideal for diagnosing stalls that occur within a method's logic rather than in calls to other methods.
- 2
An analyst is setting up a policy that should trigger when a 'Node CPU Utilization is too high' health rule violates AND a 'Business Transaction Response Time is Slow' health rule violates simultaneously. Which option in the policy creation wizard achieves this?
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Correct answer: C
Policies can be configured to trigger based on one or more health rule violation events. By selecting multiple health rules and choosing the 'ALL' option, the policy will only trigger its associated actions when all of the selected health rules are in a violated state concurrently.
- 3
A custom dashboard widget is configured to display 'Average Response Time' for a specific tier. The time range for the dashboard is set to 'Last 15 minutes'. By default, what is the data resolution, or 'roll-up interval', for the data points displayed in the widget?
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Correct answer: B
For time ranges under four hours, AppDynamics uses a 1-minute roll-up interval for metric data. This means that each data point displayed on a graph for the last 15 minutes represents the aggregate (e.g., average, sum) of all data collected during that one-minute period.
- 4
A development team wants to add custom business data to their transaction snapshots. Specifically, for a 'ProcessLoanApplication' transaction, they want to capture the
loanAmountvariable, which is an argument passed to theprocess()method. The value should be visible in the 'Business Data' section of the snapshot. Which configuration is required?Show answer details
Correct answer: B
Method Invocation Data Collectors are used to extract business data from application code, such as method parameters, return values, or invoked object states. By configuring it on the
process()method and specifying the parameter index forloanAmount, its value will be captured and displayed in the 'User Data' (Business Data) section of any snapshot for that transaction. - 5
An application flow map shows a high error rate, indicated by a red arrow, on the link between an 'App Tier' and a RabbitMQ message queue. However, when an analyst inspects the transaction snapshots from the 'App Tier', no exceptions are visible in the call graphs. What is the most likely reason for this discrepancy?
graph TD subgraph Application Flow User -->|HTTP Request| WebTier WebTier -->|RMI| AppTier AppTier -- "High Errors (15%)" -->|publish| RabbitMQ[(RabbitMQ)] endShow answer details
Correct answer: A
AppDynamics can detect errors on exit calls even if the application code doesn't throw an exception. In the case of message queues or HTTP backends, if the backend returns an error status (e.g., an AMQP error code or an HTTP 5xx status), AppDynamics will flag it as an error on the flow map. If the application's client library or custom code catches and handles this error without re-throwing it as a Java exception, it will not appear as an exception in the snapshot's call graph. The other options are less likely; network latency causes slowness, not errors, disabled error detection would show no errors anywhere, and snapshot settings affect capture, not the content of captured snapshots.
- 6
A financial services firm is monitoring a critical trading application where multiple downstream microservices are called via a message queue. The performance team needs to ensure that if the entry point Business Transaction captures a snapshot, all correlated downstream asynchronous segments are also captured with full call graphs, regardless of their individual execution times. Which configuration ensures this behavior?
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Correct answer: D
By default, a snapshot of an asynchronous transaction only includes a full call graph for the segment that triggered the snapshot (e.g., because it was very slow). To force the collection of call graphs for all participating segments, you must explicitly enable snapshot collection for each tier involved in the Business Transaction's configuration. This ensures that even if downstream segments are fast, their call graphs are included in the snapshot initiated by the entry point.
- 7
A new Java application agent is deployed, but it fails to register with the Controller. The agent logs show 'SSLHandshakeException: PKIX path building failed'. The operations team confirms that the Controller is using a custom SSL certificate issued by the company's internal Certificate Authority (CA). What is the most direct way to resolve this connectivity issue?
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Correct answer: B
The 'PKIX path building failed' error indicates the agent's JVM does not trust the SSL certificate presented by the Controller. This is because the certificate is signed by an internal CA not present in the default Java truststore. The correct resolution is to import the internal CA's root certificate into the truststore used by the agent's JVM, thereby establishing a chain of trust.
- 8
A performance analyst is configuring a health rule for a 'User_Login' Business Transaction. The goal is to trigger a 'Warning' event if the 95th Percentile Response Time for the transaction over the last 15 minutes is 20% worse than the daily trend baseline, and a 'Critical' event if it is 40% worse. Which two conditions must be configured in the health rule to achieve this? (Select TWO)
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Correct answer: A, B
- 9
An analyst needs to create a custom dashboard that shows the total number of items added to shopping carts across an entire e-commerce application per minute. This specific action is performed by a method
cart.addItem(Item item)which is not an entry point for any Business Transaction. Which AppDynamics feature should be used to capture and display this business-centric metric?Show answer details
Correct answer: C
Information Points are specifically designed to monitor business metrics from code that is not part of a Business Transaction entry point. By creating an Information Point on the
addItemmethod, AppDynamics will automatically create metrics for Calls per Minute, which directly corresponds to the number of items added to carts, and this metric can then be used in custom dashboards. - 10
Case Study:
A logistics company, ShipFast, has a monolithic Java application for tracking shipments. They are experiencing severe performance degradation during peak hours. The application consists of a web frontend tier, a business logic tier, and a backend Oracle database. The development team suspects that a specific method,
calculateShippingRoute(), within the business logic tier is the primary bottleneck, but they lack visibility. This method is called by multiple Business Transactions like 'TrackPackage' and 'SchedulePickup'.The performance analysis team has been tasked with isolating the performance of the
calculateShippingRoute()method itself, separate from the Business Transactions that call it. They need to see its average response time and calls per minute to determine if it is violating its internal SLO of 200ms. They also need to be able to trend this data over time and potentially alert on it, without creating excessive new Business Transactions.Which AppDynamics configuration should the analyst implement to meet these requirements?
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Correct answer: C
A Service Endpoint is the ideal feature for this scenario. It allows you to monitor the performance of a specific class/method (a POJO in this case) as a distinct entity, complete with its own metrics like average response time and calls per minute. This isolates its performance from the calling Business Transactions and allows for independent trending, dashboarding, and health rule configuration, directly addressing all of the company's requirements.
