Zscaler Updated ZDTE Exam Questions and Answers by gabriela

Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) uses the Log Streaming Service (LSS) to deliver ZPA logs (such as user activity and connector/authentication logs) to external SIEM and analytics platforms. LSS relies on a ZPA App Connector as the local relay between the ZPA service and the downstream log receiver. If network connectivity between ZPA and the local App Connector is interrupted, log delivery may be temporarily disrupted.

According to Zscaler integration guidance, when connectivity between ZPA and the local App Connectors is restored, LSS can retransmit up to 15 minutes of previously undelivered log data, although this retransmission is not guaranteed in all circumstances. This limited replay window is designed to provide reasonable resilience for short outages without requiring large local storage on the connector.

The 15-minute buffer applies specifically to ZPA log streaming scenarios and is distinct from longer-term log retention in Zscaler’s logging cluster or external SIEM. Options A, C, and D overstate the supported replay duration and do not match Zscaler’s documented behavior. To minimize log gaps beyond this 15-minute window, Zscaler recommends resilient network paths for App Connectors and careful monitoring of connector health so that LSS can operate continuously.

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Zscaler’s multi-tier cloud architecture is separated into distinct planes: the control plane, enforcement plane, and logging plane. The control plane is implemented by the Central Authority and is described in Zscaler architecture material as the “brains” of the platform, responsible for policy definition, administration, orchestration, and the admin UI. Crucially, this same layer also exposes the API interfaces that automation tools and scripts use. In architecture slides, the control plane is explicitly associated with “Admin UI” and “API,” showing that all administrative programmability terminates there.

The enforcement plane (Public/Private Service Edges) is focused on inspecting and enforcing policy on user traffic, while the logging plane is dedicated to storing and streaming Nanolog data to SIEM or analytics tools. Neither of these planes provides administrative configuration APIs. Study content for the ZDTE exam reinforces that the API infrastructure enables programmatic access to configure the Zero Trust Exchange and is part of the central management layer, not the traffic or logging tiers.

Therefore, when an administrator makes API calls, they are communicating with the Control Plane.

In ZPA, App Connectors are designed to be lightweight, horizontally scalable components. Their effective throughput and concurrent-connection capacity are often constrained more by network stack limitations (such as ephemeral port exhaustion and per-process file descriptor limits) than by raw CPU or memory. As a result, simply over-provisioning vCPUs and RAM to “hit” a target like 1 Gbps on a single connector usually does not provide linear performance gains.

Zscaler design guidance emphasizes deploying multiple App Connectors and allowing ZPA to intelligently load-balance traffic across them. This delivers resiliency and scales capacity while staying within realistic limits of TCP/UDP ports and OS-level descriptors. Over-scaling a single connector can lead to diminishing returns and may even create harder-to-diagnose issues when port ranges or file descriptors are saturated.

Storage is not the main factor in App Connector performance, and the platform does not recommend a “just throw more resources at it” approach. For these reasons, the correct answer is that port exhaustion and file descriptors, rather than memory or CPU, are typically the true limiting factors for App Connectors.

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