PAS-C01 Mock Exam 78 — 25 Questions

Question 1

A company runs a critical SAP application on an SAP HANA database on AWS. The database is backed up daily to Amazon S3. The company needs to ensure that the database can be restored to a point in time within the last 24 hours with minimal data loss. Which AWS service should be used to achieve this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Backup with the SAP HANA backup plan.. Option B is correct because AWS Backup supports SAP HANA backups and enables point-in-time recovery. Option A is wrong because S3 versioning only protects against accidental deletion, not database recovery. Option C is wrong because DLM is for Amazon EBS snapshots, not SAP HANA. Option D is wrong because RDS is not used for SAP HANA.

Answer

Enable S3 Object Versioning on the backup bucket.

Answer

Configure Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) for EBS snapshots.

Answer

Use Amazon RDS automated backups.

Question 2

An SAP system administrator notices that an SAP HANA database on AWS is experiencing high memory usage and slow query performance. The administrator wants to identify the root cause. Which Amazon CloudWatch metric should be analyzed first?

Accepted Answer

SwapUsage. Option C is correct because high swap usage indicates memory pressure. Option A is wrong because CPU utilization may not directly indicate memory issues. Option B is wrong because network throughput is unrelated. Option D is wrong because disk queue depth is for I/O, not memory.

Answer

NetworkIn

Answer

CPUUtilization

Answer

DiskQueueDepth

Question 3

A company is migrating its SAP landscape to AWS and wants to automate the deployment of SAP applications using infrastructure as code. Which AWS service should the company use to define and provision the AWS infrastructure?

Accepted Answer

AWS CloudFormation. Option B is correct because AWS CloudFormation allows infrastructure as code. Option A is wrong because OpsWorks is for Chef/Puppet, not primary IaC. Option C is wrong because Elastic Beanstalk is for web apps, not SAP. Option D is wrong because CodeDeploy is for application deployment, not infrastructure.

Answer

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Answer

AWS CodeDeploy

Answer

AWS OpsWorks

Question 4

An SAP administrator is troubleshooting a high CPU utilization issue on an SAP application server running on an Amazon EC2 instance. The administrator suspects a specific ABAP program is consuming excessive resources. Which AWS service can be used to capture detailed performance metrics and identify the process?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Agent. Option D is correct because CloudWatch Agent can collect detailed OS-level metrics. Option A is wrong because VPC Flow Logs capture network traffic, not CPU. Option B is wrong because Config is for compliance. Option C is wrong because CloudTrail is for API calls.

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Answer

AWS Config

Answer

Amazon VPC Flow Logs

Question 5

A company runs SAP S/4HANA in a multi-AZ deployment with a standby database in a different Availability Zone. The primary database fails. What is the expected behavior of the SAP HANA system replication?

Accepted Answer

The standby database automatically takes over as the new primary.. Option A is correct because with HANA system replication in sync mode, automatic failover to the standby occurs. Option B is wrong because manual intervention is not needed with sync replication. Option C is wrong because the standby is already in another AZ. Option D is wrong because replication is ongoing.

Answer

A new standby database is automatically provisioned in the same AZ.

Answer

The primary database is automatically restarted in the same AZ.

Answer

The administrator must manually promote the standby database.

Question 6

A company uses AWS Systems Manager to automate patching of SAP EC2 instances. The patching fails for some instances with the error 'SSM Agent not running'. What should the administrator do to resolve this?

Accepted Answer

Verify that the SSM Agent is installed and running on the instances.. Option B is correct because SSM Agent must be running. Option A is wrong because CloudWatch Agent is unrelated. Option C is wrong because VPC endpoint is not needed if instances have internet access. Option D is wrong because restarting the instance may not fix the agent if it's not installed.

Answer

Reboot the instances.

Answer

Install the Amazon CloudWatch Agent on the instances.

Answer

Configure a VPC endpoint for Systems Manager.

Question 7

Which THREE metrics should be monitored in Amazon CloudWatch to proactively identify performance issues in an SAP NetWeaver application server? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

CPUUtilization. Options A, B, and D are correct. Option C is wrong because VPC Flow Logs are not CloudWatch metrics. Option E is wrong because S3 metrics are unrelated.

Answer

S3 request metrics

Answer

VPC Flow Logs

Question 8

Which TWO AWS services can be used to automate the patching of SAP EC2 instances? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

AWS Systems Manager Maintenance Windows. Options A and B are correct. Option C is wrong because CloudFormation is for infrastructure provisioning. Option D is wrong because CodeDeploy is for application deployment. Option E is wrong because Inspector is for vulnerability scanning.

Answer

Amazon Inspector

Answer

AWS CloudFormation

Answer

AWS CodeDeploy

Question 9

A company runs a critical SAP application on AWS. The operations team needs to monitor the system for performance issues and receive alerts when CPU utilization exceeds 80% for 5 consecutive minutes. Which AWS service should be used to set up this monitoring and alerting?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch. Amazon CloudWatch can monitor CPU utilization and trigger alarms when a threshold is breached. CloudTrail is for API auditing, Config is for compliance, and AWS Health provides service health notifications.

Answer

AWS Config

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Answer

AWS Health

Question 10

A company runs SAP on AWS and uses an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to distribute traffic to a fleet of EC2 instances running SAP Web Dispatcher. The operations team notices that some instances are failing health checks intermittently. The ALB health check is configured with a 5-second interval, 2 healthy threshold, and 5 unhealthy threshold. The instances are all in the same Auto Scaling group. What is the most likely cause of the intermittent health check failures?

Accepted Answer

The health check path returns a non-200 status periodically due to a short-lived issue. If the health check path returns a non-200 status due to a brief glitch (e.g., temporary resource exhaustion), the ALB will consider the instance unhealthy after 5 consecutive failures (25 seconds). The instances are not being replaced quickly because the Auto Scaling group health check type is likely not set to ELB, or the cooldown period delays replacement.

Answer

The Auto Scaling group health check grace period is too short

Answer

The ALB health check interval is too long

Answer

The health check path returns a 200 status only when the application is fully loaded

Question 11

The operations team uses the IAM policy above for a group of administrators. An administrator tries to terminate an EC2 instance that is tagged with Environment=Production. What will happen?

Accepted Answer

The termination will be denied because there is no explicit Allow for TerminateInstances. The Deny statement has a condition that denies termination only when the tag is NOT Production. Since the instance is tagged Production, the condition is not met, so the Deny does not apply. The Allow statement does not include TerminateInstances, so there is no explicit Allow for termination. The default is implicit Deny, so the action is denied.

Answer

The termination will be denied because the Deny condition applies to all instances

Answer

The termination will be allowed because the Deny condition is not met

Answer

The termination will be allowed because the Deny does not apply to Production instances

Question 12

An SAP system on AWS is experiencing high latency between the application server and the database server. Both servers are in the same VPC but in different Availability Zones. Which action should the administrator take to reduce latency?

Accepted Answer

Move the application and database servers to the same Availability Zone. Option A is correct because placing both instances in the same AZ reduces network hops. Option B is wrong because increasing instance size does not directly reduce latency. Option C is wrong because using a VPN adds complexity and may not reduce latency. Option D is wrong while using a placement group may help, placing in same AZ is more direct.

Answer

Create a placement group and launch both instances in it

Answer

Upgrade the instance types to compute-optimized instances

Answer

Use AWS Direct Connect to connect the servers

Question 13

An SAP Basis administrator needs to monitor the performance of SAP HANA database using Amazon CloudWatch. Which of the following metrics should be monitored to detect potential CPU bottlenecks?

Accepted Answer

CPUUtilization. Option B is correct because the CPU Utilization metric directly measures the percentage of CPU capacity used. Option A is wrong because Memory utilization indicates memory pressure, not CPU. Option C is wrong because Disk Read/Write Bytes indicate I/O activity. Option D is wrong because Network packets indicate network traffic.

Answer

MemoryUtilization

Answer

DiskReadBytes / DiskWriteBytes

Answer

NetworkPacketsIn / NetworkPacketsOut

Question 14

A company is running a production SAP HANA database on an r5.4xlarge EC2 instance with EBS-backed storage. The operations team notices that the database checkpoint writes are frequently slow, causing application performance degradation. The team has already increased the EBS IOPS and throughput. What should the team do next to improve checkpoint write performance?

Accepted Answer

Modify the Linux I/O scheduler to 'noop' and ensure the EBS-optimized instance attribute is enabled.. Option C is correct because SAP HANA checkpoint writes are sequential and benefit from larger block sizes. The default Linux I/O scheduler can cause fragmentation; switching to noop or using NVMe instance storage with optimized settings is a best practice. Option A is wrong because increasing EBS IOPS further may not help if the issue is I/O scheduling. Option B is wrong because moving to gp2 provides lower performance than io1/io2 with provisioned IOPS. Option D is wrong because disabling checkpoint compression increases write volume and may worsen performance.

Answer

Change the EBS volume type from io1 to gp2 for higher throughput.

Answer

Disable SAP HANA checkpoint compression to reduce CPU overhead.

Answer

Increase the EBS volume size to gain additional baseline IOPS.

Question 15

Which THREE of the following are best practices for operating an SAP HANA database on AWS in a production environment?

Accepted Answer

Ensure the EC2 instance is EBS-optimized.. Option A is correct because multiple EBS volumes striped with LVM or RAID 0 provide higher throughput. Option B is correct because a separate volume for log and data is recommended by SAP. Option D is correct because EBS-optimized instances provide dedicated bandwidth for EBS. Option C is wrong because snapshotting a multi-volume database without application-consistent state can lead to corruption. Option E is wrong because swap on EC2 instance store is not recommended for HANA; HANA uses memory and swap is discouraged.

Answer

Configure a swap partition on the instance store.

Answer

Use a single large EBS volume for both data and logs to simplify management.

Question 16

A company runs SAP on AWS and has configured a cross-region DR strategy using Amazon EBS snapshots. The DR region is in us-west-2. After a region-wide outage, the administrator attempts to restore the snapshots but finds the latest snapshot is incomplete. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The latest snapshot copy had not completed before the outage. Option B is correct because cross-region snapshot copies are asynchronous and may fail if the source region becomes unavailable. Option A is wrong because IAM does not prevent copying. Option C is wrong because KMS keys can be used cross-region with proper configuration. Option D is wrong because the snapshot ID would not become invalid.

Answer

The IAM role used for copying snapshots does not have permissions

Answer

The snapshots are encrypted with a KMS key that is not available in us-west-2

Answer

The snapshot ID used for recovery is not valid

Question 17

A company is migrating its SAP environment to AWS. The operations team needs to ensure that all changes to the SAP infrastructure are tracked and that unauthorized changes are detected. Which AWS service should they use?

Accepted Answer

AWS Config. Option A is correct. AWS Config records configuration changes and detects drift. Option B is incorrect because CloudTrail records API calls, not configuration state. Option C is incorrect because Trusted Advisor provides best practice checks. Option D is incorrect because GuardDuty is for threat detection.

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Answer

Amazon GuardDuty

Answer

AWS Trusted Advisor

Question 18

A company runs SAP HANA on AWS using EC2 instances with HANA data replication between two Availability Zones. The operations team needs to test a disaster recovery failover. What is the correct procedure to promote the secondary HANA system to primary?

Accepted Answer

Use the HANA takeover command on the secondary system. For HANA system replication, the secondary must be taken over using HANA Studio or hdbsql. Stopping the primary or shutting down EC2 instances does not trigger a clean takeover; modifying DNS without promoting the database would cause data inconsistency.

Answer

Stop the primary HANA system on the primary EC2 instance

Answer

Modify the DNS record to point to the secondary instance

Answer

Shut down the primary EC2 instance and wait for automatic failover

Question 19

The operations team deploys the CloudFormation template above. After the stack creation completes, the EC2 instance is launched but the SAP application is not running. What is the most likely reason?

Accepted Answer

The UserData script only installs httpd, not the SAP application. The UserData script installs httpd (Apache), not the SAP application. The template does not include any steps to install or start the SAP application. The security group is referenced but not shown; it is likely correct. The instance type is appropriate for SAP. The AMI ID is valid.

Answer

The security group does not allow inbound traffic to the SAP application port

Answer

The instance type is not suitable for SAP applications

Answer

The AMI ID is incorrect

Question 20

Which TWO actions should an SAP administrator take to ensure high availability for an SAP HANA database on AWS? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Enable SAP HANA system replication. Options A and B are correct. Enabling system replication provides data redundancy, and using a Multi-AZ deployment ensures automatic failover. Option C is wrong because a single EBS volume does not provide HA. Option D is wrong because manual snapshots are not automatic HA. Option E is wrong because a single instance lacks redundancy.

Answer

Deploy the database on a single large instance

Answer

Schedule regular manual snapshots

Answer

Use a single EBS volume with high IOPS