PAS-C01 Practice Test 7 — 10 Questions

Question 1

An SAP administrator notices that the SAP HANA database is running on an EC2 instance with a single EBS volume for /hana/data and /hana/log. The system is experiencing high latency during write operations. What is the most cost-effective design change to improve performance?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

Create separate EBS volumes for /hana/data and /hana/log, attaching them to the instance. SAP HANA requires separate EBS volumes for /hana/data and /hana/log to avoid I/O contention. When both directories share a single volume, write operations to the log (sequential) and data (random) compete for the same queue depth and bandwidth, causing high latency. Separating them allows each workload to use dedicated IOPS and throughput, which is the most cost-effective fix without upgrading to premium volume types.

Answer

Use an Instance Store volume for /hana/data

Answer

Modify the EBS volume to use Provisioned IOPS (io2) with higher IOPS

Answer

Increase the size of the existing EBS volume to gain more throughput

Question 2

An SAP administrator needs to configure high availability for SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP. They plan to use AWS services. Which combination of services is required?

Accepted Answer

Amazon EFS and Pacemaker on EC2. SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP high availability on AWS requires shared storage for the /sapmnt and /usr/sap/trans directories, which Amazon EFS provides via NFSv4, and a cluster manager like Pacemaker on EC2 to orchestrate failover between the primary and secondary application servers. This combination ensures that the SAP central services (ASCS and ERS) can fail over seamlessly in the event of an instance or availability zone failure.

Answer

AWS Global Accelerator and Auto Scaling

Answer

Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Route 53

Answer

Amazon EBS Multi-Attach volumes

Question 3

An SAP application is experiencing high latency when writing to an Amazon EBS volume. The volume is a gp2 type attached to an m5.4xlarge instance. Which change would improve write performance?

Accepted Answer

Change the volume type to io2 and provision sufficient IOPS.. The gp2 volume's baseline performance of 3 IOPS per GiB (max 16,000 IOPS) is insufficient for the SAP application's write-intensive workload, causing high latency. Changing to io2 with provisioned IOPS ensures consistent, high-performance writes by decoupling IOPS from volume size, directly addressing the latency issue.

Answer

Increase the size of the gp2 volume to 1 TB.

Answer

Change the volume type to st1.

Answer

Enable EBS optimization on the EC2 instance.

Question 4

A company runs SAP on AWS and needs to ensure that the SAP application logs are centrally collected and analyzed for security incidents. Which AWS service should be used to collect and store the logs from EC2 instances?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Logs. Amazon CloudWatch Logs can collect and store application logs from EC2 instances using the unified CloudWatch agent. It provides centralized log management and can be used for security incident analysis. Option A (Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose) is for streaming data to destinations like S3 or Redshift, not primarily for log collection from instances. Option B (AWS CloudTrail) records API activity, not application logs. Option C (Amazon S3) can store logs but does not directly collect them from EC2 instances without additional services like CloudWatch Logs or Kinesis. Therefore, Amazon CloudWatch Logs is the correct service for collecting and storing SAP application logs from EC2 instances.

Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Answer

Amazon S3

Question 5

An SAP administrator wants to monitor the CPU utilization of SAP application servers using Amazon CloudWatch. What is the minimum configuration required?

Accepted Answer

Install and configure the AWS CloudWatch Agent on each SAP application server.. The AWS CloudWatch Agent must be installed and configured on each SAP application server to collect custom metrics like CPU utilization at the granularity and frequency required for SAP monitoring. CloudWatch by default only provides basic EC2 metrics (every 5 minutes) and cannot capture OS-level or application-level CPU utilization without the agent. The agent sends metrics via the CloudWatch PutMetricData API, enabling detailed monitoring of SAP-specific performance counters.

Answer

Set up an AWS Lambda function to query EC2 metrics from the CloudWatch API.

Answer

Configure SAP Solution Manager to export metrics to CloudWatch.

Answer

Enable EC2 detailed monitoring from the AWS Management Console.

Question 6

An SAP system on AWS is using an Oracle database. The company wants to implement automated backups to Amazon S3. Which AWS service should be used to orchestrate the backup process?

Accepted Answer

AWS Backup. AWS Backup is the correct service because it provides a fully managed, policy-driven backup solution that can orchestrate backups for SAP workloads running on Amazon EC2 with Oracle databases. It integrates directly with Amazon S3 for storing backup data and supports custom backup scripts via the AWS Backup API or AWS Lambda, enabling automated, scheduled backups without manual intervention.

Answer

Amazon RDS for Oracle

Answer

Amazon S3 Lifecycle policies

Answer

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)

Question 7

A company is running a mission-critical SAP S/4HANA system on AWS in the us-east-1 region. The system uses a two-tier architecture with the SAP application server and HANA database on the same EC2 instance. The instance type is an r5.24xlarge with 12 x 2 TB gp3 EBS volumes striped using LVM. The HANA data volume is 10 TB. The company has a disaster recovery (DR) requirement with an RPO of 15 minutes and an RTO of 4 hours. The DR site must be in us-west-2. The company currently takes daily EBS snapshots of the data volume and copies them to us-west-2. However, they are not meeting the RPO. The operations team is considering implementing SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) asynchronously to the DR region. However, network latency between us-east-1 and us-west-2 averages 60 ms. The SAP HANA database has a heavy write workload, with average log writes of 500 MB/sec. The team is concerned that the replication may fall behind and cause data loss. What should the team do to meet the DR requirements while minimizing data loss?

Accepted Answer

Implement HSR asynchronously and also enable HANA log backups to an S3 bucket in us-west-2.. Combining asynchronous HANA System Replication (HSR) with HANA log backups to an S3 bucket in us-west-2 provides a dual-layer protection strategy. Asynchronous HSR will replicate log changes in near real-time, but given the 60 ms latency and 500 MB/sec write workload, it may fall behind; the log backups act as a safety net to capture any log data that hasn't been replicated yet, allowing recovery with minimal data loss while still meeting the 15-minute RPO.

Answer

Switch to synchronous replication to ensure zero data loss.

Answer

Increase the HANA log buffer size to reduce the frequency of log flushes, so that less data is sent over the network.

Answer

Use HSR with multiple replicas in us-west-2 to improve replication speed.

Question 8

An SAP HANA database is running on an r5.8xlarge instance. The administrator notices high swap usage and suspects memory pressure. Which AWS metric should be monitored to confirm memory utilization?

Accepted Answer

CWAgent namespace metrics. The CWAgent namespace metrics are correct because the CloudWatch agent, when installed on the EC2 instance, can capture detailed OS-level memory utilization metrics (such as `mem_used_percent` and `mem_available_percent`) that are not available in the default EC2 or EBS namespaces. This allows the administrator to directly confirm memory pressure causing high swap usage on the SAP HANA database.

Answer

AWS/Lambda namespace metrics

Answer

EC2 namespace metrics

Answer

EBS namespace metrics

Question 9

An SAP system on AWS is using an SAP HANA database. The database administrator wants to monitor memory usage and receive alerts when memory consumption exceeds 90%. Which THREE services can be used together to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is correct because it provides a fully managed pub/sub messaging service that can deliver alerts (e.g., via email, SMS, or HTTP endpoints) when triggered by an Amazon CloudWatch Alarm. In this scenario, once the CloudWatch Alarm detects that memory usage exceeds 90%, it publishes to an SNS topic, which then sends the notification to the database administrator. This enables real-time alerting without requiring custom polling or additional infrastructure.

Answer

AWS Config

Answer

Amazon Inspector

Question 10

A company is migrating a legacy three-tier web application to AWS. The application uses a MySQL database and stores session data in the database. The company wants to minimize database load and improve scalability. Which TWO actions should the company take to achieve these goals?

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon ElastiCache to store session data instead of the database.. Storing session data in the database creates unnecessary write load and latency. Amazon ElastiCache (Memcached or Redis) provides an in-memory key-value store that is ideal for transient session data, reducing database load and improving application scalability by offloading session management from the persistent MySQL layer.

Answer

Configure Amazon RDS Multi-AZ for high availability.

Answer

Use Auto Scaling for the web server tier to handle variable traffic.

Answer

Use Amazon RDS read replicas to offload read traffic from the primary database.