VA-002-P HashiCorp Certified: Vault Associate Free Practice Exam Questions (2025 Updated)

Sentinel is an embedded policy-as-code framework integrated with the HashiCorp Enterprise products. It enables fine-grained, logic-based policy decisions, and can be extended to use information from external sources.

The terraform fmt command is used to rewrite Terraform configuration files to a canonical format and style. This command applies a subset of the Terraform language style conventions, along with other minor adjustments for readability.

Other Terraform commands that generate Terraform configuration will produce configuration files that conform to the style imposed by terraform fmt, so using this style in your own files will ensure consistency.

The Vault server process collects various runtime metrics about the performance of different libraries and subsystems. These metrics are aggregated on a ten-second interval and are retained for one minute. This telemetry information can be used for debugging or otherwise getting a better view of what Vault is doing.

Telemetry information can be streamed directly from Vault to a range of metrics aggregation solutions as described in the telemetry Stanza documentation.

Reference link:- https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/internals/telemetry

If supported by your backend, Terraform will lock your state for all operations that could write state. This prevents others from acquiring the lock and potentially corrupting your state.

State locking happens automatically on all operations that could write state. You won't see any message that it is happening. If state locking fails, Terraform will not continue. You can disable state locking for most commands with the -lock flag but it is not recommended.

For local state, Terraform stores the workspace states in a directory called terraform.tfstate.d.

https://www.terraform.io/docs/state/workspaces.html#workspace-internals

API and CLI access are managed with API tokens, which can be generated in the Terraform Cloud UI. Each user can generate any number of personal API tokens, which allow access with their own identity and permissions. Organizations and teams can also generate tokens for automating tasks that aren't tied to an individual user.

For replication (port 8201), Vault generates a mutual TLS connection between nodes using self-generated certs/keys (this is different than the TLS you configure in the listener, which is particular to client requests)... server-to-server always uses this mutual TLS, even if you have TLS disabled on the listener.

Reference link:-

https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/configuration/listener/tcp

https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/concepts/ha

The list below contains all the requirements for publishing a module. Meeting the requirements for publishing a module is extremely easy. The list may appear long only to ensure we're detailed, but adhering to the requirements should happen naturally.

GitHub. The module must be on GitHub and must be a public repo. This is only a requirement for the public registry. If you're using a private registry, you may ignore this requirement.

Named terraform--. Module repositories must use this three-part name format, where reflects the type of infrastructure the module manages, and is the main provider where it creates that infrastructure. The segment can contain additional hyphens. Examples: terraform-google-vault or terraform-aws-ec2-instance.

Repository description. The GitHub repository description is used to populate the short description of the module. This should be a simple one-sentence description of the module.

Standard module structure. The module must adhere to the standard module structure. This allows the registry to inspect your module and generate documentation, track resource usage, parse submodules and examples, and more.

x.y.z tags for releases. The registry uses tags to identify module versions. Release tag names must be a semantic version, which can optionally be prefixed with a v. For example, v1.0.4 and 0.9.2. To publish a module initially, at least one release tag must be present. Tags that don't look like version numbers are ignored.

https://www.terraform.io/docs/registry/modules/publish.html#requirements

Each time a new provider is added to configuration -- either explicitly via a provider block or by adding a resource from that provider -- Terraform must initialize the provider before it can be used. Initialization downloads and installs the provider's plugin so that it can later be executed.

For production use, you should constrain the acceptable provider versions via configuration file to ensure that new versions with breaking changes will not be automatically installed by terraform init in the future. When terraform init is run without provider version constraints, it prints a suggested version constraint string for each provider

For example:

terraform {

required_providers {

aws = ">= 2.7.0"

}

}

Currently, Terraform has no mechanism to redact or protect secrets that are returned via data sources, so secrets read via this provider will be persisted into the Terraform state, into any plan files, and in some cases in the console output produced while planning and applying. These artifacts must, therefore, all be protected accordingly.

The root token should never be used on a day-to-day basis and should always be revoked once a permanent auth method has been configured.

Vault does NOT store any data encrypted via the transit/encrypt endpoint. The output you received is the ciphertext. You can store this ciphertext at the desired location (e.g. MySQL database) or pass it to another application.

The terraform console command provides an interactive console for evaluating expressions.

https://www.terraform.io/docs/commands/console.html

Terraform destroy will always prompt for confirmation before executing unless passed the -auto-approve flag.

$ terraform destroy

Do you really want to destroy all resources?

Terraform will destroy all your managed infrastructure, as shown above.

There is no undo. Only 'yes' will be accepted to confirm.

Enter a value:

To view the paths leading up to the secrets/apps/app1 path in the user interface, the user must have at least LIST permissions to avoid permission denied error in the UI.

Vault Agent is a client daemon that provides the following features:

- Auto-Auth

- Caching

- Templating

Reference link:- https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/agent

The terraform workspace new command is used to create a new workspace. https://www.terraform.io/docs/commands/workspace/new.html

The Consul agent is the core Consul process that runs the Consul service. Everything Consul does is the result of the Consul agent, which can run in either server or client mode.

Reference link:- https://www.consul.io/docs/agent