PAS-C01 Operations and Maintenance Practice Test 16 — 15 Questions

Question 1

An SAP system running on AWS experiences periodic performance degradation. Analysis shows that the issue occurs when an on-premises monitoring system polls the SAP application server. Which AWS service can help mitigate this by caching or throttling requests?

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

Accepted Answer

AWS WAF. AWS WAF is correct because it can inspect incoming HTTP/HTTPS requests and apply rate-based rules to throttle or block excessive polling from the on-premises monitoring system. This directly mitigates the performance degradation by limiting the request rate before it reaches the SAP application server. WAF operates at the application layer (Layer 7) and integrates with Application Load Balancers, API Gateway, and CloudFront, making it suitable for protecting SAP web endpoints.

Answer

Amazon Route 53

Answer

Amazon CloudFront

Answer

Elastic Load Balancing

Question 2

A company wants to automate the start and stop of SAP EC2 instances during non-business hours to reduce costs. Which AWS service is best suited for this task?

Accepted Answer

AWS Instance Scheduler. AWS Instance Scheduler is a solution that automates the starting and stopping of EC2 instances based on schedules you define, specifically designed for cost reduction during non-business hours. It uses CloudWatch Events and Lambda under the hood but provides a ready-to-deploy, configurable scheduling mechanism for EC2 and RDS instances. This directly matches the requirement to automate start/stop of SAP EC2 instances without custom development.

Answer

AWS Auto Scaling

Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Events

Answer

AWS Systems Manager

Question 3

A company is running SAP on EC2 instances with EBS volumes. They need to take daily snapshots of the EBS volumes and retain them for 90 days. Which approach is most cost-effective?

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) to automate snapshots and set a retention policy of 90 days.. Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) is purpose-built to automate EBS snapshot creation and retention at no additional cost — you pay only for the snapshots themselves. Configuring a DLM policy with a 90-day retention schedule directly meets the requirement with the least operational overhead and lowest cost.

Answer

Use S3 Lifecycle policies to transition snapshots to Glacier after 90 days.

Answer

Create a script that takes snapshots daily and stores them indefinitely.

Answer

Use AWS Backup to schedule backups and set retention to 90 days.

Question 4

A company needs to track API calls made to create, modify, or delete SAP-related resources in AWS. Which service should be used?

Accepted Answer

AWS CloudTrail. AWS CloudTrail records all API calls for auditing and governance. Option B (AWS Config) tracks configuration changes to resources. Option C (VPC Flow Logs) captures network traffic information. Option D (Amazon CloudWatch) monitors metrics and logs, not API calls.

Answer

AWS Config

Answer

VPC Flow Logs

Answer

Amazon CloudWatch

Question 5

Which THREE components are required to set up a highly available SAP HANA database using AWS services? (Choose 3)

Accepted Answer

Multi-AZ deployment with synchronous replication. Option C (Multi-AZ deployment with synchronous replication) is correct because SAP HANA high availability requires the primary and secondary nodes to be placed in separate Availability Zones with synchronous replication (e.g., HSR in sync mode) so that no data is lost and failover can occur if one AZ fails. Option D (Cluster manager such as Pacemaker) is correct because Pacemaker (with corosync and SAPHana resource agents) is the standard cluster resource manager used to detect failures and orchestrate automatic failover of the HANA database between nodes. Option E (Elastic IP address) is correct because an EIP provides a static, movable virtual IP that can be reassigned to the standby node during failover, allowing clients to reconnect to the same address without DNS changes. Option A (Application Load Balancer) is not required because ALB operates at Layer 7 for HTTP/HTTPS traffic and is not used for HANA database failover, which relies on a floating IP and cluster manager. Option B (Single Availability Zone deployment) is incorrect because placing all nodes in one AZ eliminates protection against AZ-level failures and defeats the purpose of high availability.

Answer

Application Load Balancer

Answer

Single Availability Zone deployment

Question 6

A company runs an SAP HANA database on an r5.8xlarge EC2 instance. The operations team notices that the instance's CPU utilization spikes to 100% every night at 2 AM, causing SAP application timeouts. CloudWatch metrics show the spike corresponds to a backup process. Which action should be taken to resolve the issue?

Accepted Answer

Move the backup window to an earlier time when the system is less active.. Moving the backup window to an earlier time when the system is less active is the best action because the CPU spike is caused by the backup process. By scheduling the backup during off-peak hours, the impact on SAP application performance is minimized, avoiding timeouts. This addresses the root cause without unnecessary scaling or disabling backups.

Answer

Increase the instance size to handle the backup load.

Answer

Disable the nightly backup.

Answer

Implement CloudWatch alarm to restart the instance when CPU is high.

Question 7

An SAP system administrator receives an alert that an EBS volume attached to an SAP application server is at 95% capacity. The volume is 100 GB gp2 and stores log files. What is the MOST efficient way to resolve the space issue?

Accepted Answer

Configure log rotation and move old logs to Amazon S3 Glacier.. Configuring log rotation ensures logs are managed systematically, and moving old logs to Amazon S3 Glacier provides cost-effective long-term storage while freeing up space on the EBS volume. Option A is incorrect because simply increasing the volume size is a temporary fix and does not address the root cause of log accumulation. Option B is incorrect because manual deletion is error-prone and not scalable. Option D is incorrect because attaching an additional EBS volume also provides a temporary solution and adds management overhead without addressing log management best practices.

Answer

Increase the volume size using Amazon EBS Elastic Volumes.

Answer

Delete the oldest log files manually.

Answer

Attach an additional EBS volume for log storage.

Question 8

An SAP HANA database on AWS experiences a failover from the primary to the secondary node. After the failover, the secondary node (now primary) is running on a different AZ. The SAP application cannot connect to the new primary. What is the MOST likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The application connection string points to the old primary's IP address.. After an SAP HANA system replication failover, the secondary node takes over the HANA database role, but its IP address (and possibly hostname) differs from the old primary. If the SAP application's connection string or SAP profile (e.g., hdbuserstore entries, DEFAULT.PFL, or the HANA tenant DB connection) still points to the old primary's IP, the application cannot connect. This is the most common post-failover issue in SAP-on-AWS HA deployments.

Answer

HANA system replication is not configured correctly.

Answer

The security group for the new primary does not allow inbound traffic from the app.

Answer

The EBS volumes are not attached to the new primary.

Question 9

A company is running SAP on AWS and needs to patch the operating system of multiple SAP application servers. The servers are in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. What strategy minimizes downtime?

Accepted Answer

Perform a rolling update by updating the Auto Scaling group's launch configuration with a new AMI.. A rolling update by updating the Auto Scaling group's launch configuration (or launch template) with a new AMI and then performing an instance refresh allows instances to be replaced in batches while the ALB continues to route traffic to healthy instances. This minimizes downtime because at least some instances remain available to serve traffic throughout the process.

Answer

Create a new Auto Scaling group with patched instances and shift traffic using Route 53.

Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager to patch all instances at once.

Answer

Stop all instances, apply patches, then start them.

Question 10

An SAP system is experiencing slow performance. The SAP team suspects a memory bottleneck in the HANA database. The database runs on an r5.24xlarge instance with 768 GB RAM. CloudWatch metrics show the HANA memory usage is consistently above 90%. Which action should be taken first?

Accepted Answer

Increase the HANA memory allocation parameter in the global.ini file.. The HANA database may have a memory allocation parameter that is lower than the available physical memory, causing a bottleneck even when RAM is available. Increasing this parameter in the global.ini file allows HANA to use more memory, addressing the issue without scaling up. Option A is wrong because reducing HANA services does not directly increase memory availability for the database; it may reduce workload but not the memory bottleneck. Option B is wrong because upgrading the instance is a more disruptive and costly step that should be considered only after tuning parameters. Option D is wrong because swap space is much slower than RAM and is a temporary fix, not a solution for a persistent memory bottleneck.

Answer

Reduce the number of HANA services.

Answer

Upgrade the instance to a larger memory-optimized type.

Answer

Increase the swap space on the instance.

Question 11

A company has an SAP environment with a recovery time objective (RTO) of 2 hours and a recovery point objective (RPO) of 15 minutes. Which backup strategy meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Incremental backups every 15 minutes and log backups every 5 minutes.. To meet an RPO of 15 minutes, backups must capture data at least every 15 minutes — incremental backups every 15 minutes plus log backups every 5 minutes satisfies this with margin. The RTO of 2 hours is achievable because restoring incremental backups plus replaying logs can be completed within that window. This is the only option that meets the 15-minute RPO requirement.

Answer

Daily full backups to Amazon S3 and log backups every 30 minutes.

Answer

Weekly full backups and daily differential backups.

Answer

Hourly EBS snapshots and continuous log shipping to S3.

Question 12

An SAP administrator is setting up monitoring for an SAP HANA database. Which TWO metrics should be monitored from the HANA database using Amazon CloudWatch?

Accepted Answer

CPU utilization of the HANA process. Option A (CPU utilization of the HANA process) is correct because the HANA database exposes process-level CPU consumption through its own monitoring views (e.g., M_CPU / M_SERVICE_STATISTICS), which can be published to CloudWatch via the CloudWatch agent or SAP's CloudWatch integration to detect HANA-side compute saturation. Option E (Memory usage, used memory / total memory) is correct because HANA's in-memory architecture makes memory consumption a critical health metric, and the used/total memory ratio is exposed by HANA's statistics services and should be pushed to CloudWatch for alerting on memory pressure. Option B (SAPS) is not a HANA database metric published to CloudWatch; SAPS is a sizing/benchmark unit, not a runtime metric collected from HANA. Option C (EBS volume queue length) is an AWS/EBS storage-layer metric reported by CloudWatch for the underlying volume, not a metric gathered from inside the HANA database. Option D (Network packet loss) is a network-layer metric, not one exposed by the HANA database itself for CloudWatch monitoring.

Answer

SAPS (SAP Application Performance Standard)

Answer

EBS volume queue length

Answer

Network packet loss

Question 13

A company runs a critical SAP ERP system on AWS. The architecture includes an SAP HANA database on an r5.24xlarge instance (with 768 GB RAM) in us-east-1a, and multiple SAP application servers in an Auto Scaling group across two Availability Zones (us-east-1a and us-east-1b). The database uses EBS volumes: two 1 TB gp3 volumes for data, one 500 GB gp3 for log, and one 100 GB gp3 for backup. The system has been running without issues for months. At 3:00 PM, the operations team receives alerts from Amazon CloudWatch that the HANA database instance's CPU utilization is at 100%, memory usage is at 95%, and the disk queue length for the log volume is consistently above 10. The SAP application is experiencing intermittent timeouts. The team checks the HANA studio and sees that there are many long-running queries and that the log volume is almost full (95% used). The database backups are scheduled to run at 2:00 AM and completed successfully. There have been no changes to the system or workload recently. The team suspects a performance degradation. What is the MOST likely cause of the issue?

Accepted Answer

The log volume is almost full, causing HANA to stall transaction processing.. The log volume being 95% full is the critical indicator. SAP HANA requires adequate free space in the log volume to write redo log entries; when the log volume approaches capacity, HANA stalls transaction processing to prevent data loss, causing the CPU to spike as it waits and the application to experience timeouts. The long-running queries and high disk queue length are symptoms of this stall, not the root cause.

Answer

The HANA database has reached its memory limit due to the global.ini allocation.

Answer

The gp3 volume's baseline IOPS are insufficient for the current workload.

Answer

A backup job is running and consuming CPU and I/O resources.

Question 14

A company runs an SAP HANA database on an EC2 instance in a single Availability Zone. The database experiences performance degradation during peak hours. Which action should be taken to improve performance without changing the instance type?

Accepted Answer

Enable Enhanced Networking on the EC2 instance. Enabling Enhanced Networking on the EC2 instance reduces network latency and improves throughput, which is critical for SAP HANA performance during peak hours. Option A is wrong because increasing provisioned IOPS can help with storage performance but does not address network bottlenecks. Option B is wrong because detailed CloudWatch monitoring provides more metrics but does not directly improve performance. Option C is wrong while gp3 volumes offer better baseline performance, switching to gp3 may not fully resolve network-related performance degradation without also enabling Enhanced Networking.

Answer

Increase the provisioned IOPS on the EBS volumes

Answer

Enable detailed CloudWatch monitoring

Answer

Change the EBS volumes to gp3

Question 15

An SAP administrator needs to automate the daily backup of an SAP HANA database running on EC2. Which AWS service should be used to schedule and manage the backup process?

Accepted Answer

AWS Backup. AWS Backup is a fully managed, policy-based backup service that supports SAP HANA on EC2 through application-consistent backups when integrated with SAP HANA's backint API or via custom scripts. It allows administrators to define backup plans with schedules, retention rules, and lifecycle policies, and it centralizes backup management across AWS services. This makes it the correct choice for automating daily HANA backups.

Answer

Amazon S3 Lifecycle policies

Answer

AWS Data Pipeline

Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Events