PAS-C01 Operations and Maintenance Practice Test 18 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company runs SAP BusinessObjects on AWS. The system includes a web application server and a CMS database on separate EC2 instances. The operations team receives alerts that the CMS database server's EBS volume is approaching its maximum capacity. The volume is a gp3 EBS volume with 3000 IOPS and 125 MB/s throughput. Upon investigation, the team finds that the volume is 90% full and write performance has degraded. The application is experiencing slow response times. What should the team do to resolve the issue without downtime?

Accepted Answer

Expand the EBS volume size and extend the file system.. Option B is correct because expanding the volume size increases available capacity and also increases baseline performance for gp3 (more capacity = more throughput). This can be done without downtime. Option A is wrong because modifying IOPS alone does not increase capacity. Option C is wrong because converting to io2 might not be necessary and could increase cost. Option D is wrong because moving to instance store is not recommended for persistent data and requires downtime.

Answer

Move the database to an instance store volume for better performance.

Answer

Migrate the database to an io2 Block Express volume with higher performance.

Answer

Increase the IOPS and throughput of the existing volume.

Question 2

An SAP system on AWS uses an Auto Scaling group for the application tier. The scaling policy is based on the average CPU utilization of the EC2 instances. During peak hours, the system scales out, but the new instances take a long time to become available because they need to install SAP software and configure them. This delay causes performance degradation. The operations team wants to reduce the time to scale out. Which solution should they implement?

Accepted Answer

Create a custom AMI with SAP software pre-installed and use it in the launch configuration.. Option A is correct because using a pre-configured AMI with SAP software pre-installed eliminates the need for installation at launch. Option B is wrong because instance store is ephemeral. Option C is wrong because Elastic Beanstalk is not the best for SAP. Option D is wrong because increasing instance size does not reduce launch time.

Answer

Increase the instance size to reduce boot time.

Answer

Switch to AWS Elastic Beanstalk for automatic scaling.

Answer

Use an instance store-backed AMI instead of EBS-backed.

Question 3

A company is running SAP S/4HANA on AWS with an RDS for SAP HANA database. The operations team needs to perform a minor version upgrade of the database. They want to minimize downtime and ensure that the upgrade can be rolled back if needed. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Take a manual snapshot before the upgrade, then perform the upgrade.. Option D is correct because creating a snapshot before the upgrade allows rollback, and RDS supports minor version upgrades with minimal downtime (usually a few minutes). Option A is wrong because creating a read replica does not help with upgrade rollback. Option B is wrong because Multi-AZ does not directly help with upgrade rollback. Option C is wrong because cloning is for Aurora, not RDS for HANA.

Answer

Enable Multi-AZ, then perform the upgrade.

Answer

Use the clone feature of SAP HANA to create a copy.

Answer

Create a read replica, promote it after the upgrade.

Question 4

An SAP system on AWS uses a shared file system for the SAP transport directory. The file system is hosted on an Amazon EFS file system. Recently, the operations team noticed that SAP transports are failing with errors indicating file locking issues. The EFS file system is mounted using the NFS client with default options. What is the most likely cause of the file locking issues?

Accepted Answer

The EFS file system is mounted using NFS version 3, which has limited locking support.. Option B is correct because EFS does not support NFS v3 file locking properly; NFS v4.1 is recommended for locking. Option A is wrong because EFS access points do not affect locking. Option C is wrong because security group would not cause locking failures. Option D is wrong because throughput is unrelated to locking.

Answer

The EFS file system has insufficient throughput for the number of concurrent mounts.

Answer

The security group for the EFS mount targets does not allow inbound traffic on port 2049.

Answer

The EFS file system is using access points that restrict permissions.

Question 5

A company has an SAP HANA database running on an EC2 instance with multiple EBS volumes striped using LVM. The database is experiencing high latency during peak hours. Monitoring shows that the EBS volumes have a high Average Queue Length (avgqueue) and are frequently hitting the IOPS limit. The volumes are gp2 with 3000 IOPS each. The operations team wants to improve performance without increasing storage size. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Change the volume type to gp3 and increase the IOPS and throughput.. Option D is correct because changing the volume type to gp3 offers higher baseline IOPS (3000) and allows separate increase of IOPS and throughput without changing size. Option A is wrong because adding more gp2 volumes increases cost but may not address the bottleneck if the LVM is not balanced. Option B is wrong because instance store is ephemeral and not suitable for database. Option C is wrong because io2 Block Express is for very high performance but may be overkill; gp3 is a better immediate step.

Answer

Change the volume type to io2 Block Express with higher IOPS.

Answer

Migrate the database to an instance store-backed instance.

Answer

Add more gp2 volumes to the LVM stripe set.

Question 6

An SAP system administrator needs to monitor the CPU utilization of an EC2 instance running SAP NetWeaver. The administrator wants to receive an alert when the CPU utilization exceeds 80% for 5 consecutive minutes. Which AWS service should be used to create this alarm?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Alarms. Option B is correct because CloudWatch Alarms can monitor metrics and trigger actions. Option A is wrong because CloudWatch Logs is for log data. Option C is wrong because CloudTrail is for API activity. Option D is wrong because Config is for resource configuration.

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Answer

AWS Config

Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Logs

Question 7

A company runs SAP ERP on AWS with a two-tier architecture: application and database on the same EC2 instance. The instance is part of an Auto Scaling group with a minimum of 1 and maximum of 1, so it's effectively a single instance. The operations team wants to implement a patching strategy for the operating system that minimizes downtime. They need to apply security patches quarterly. Which approach should they take?

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager Automation to create a new AMI, launch a new instance, and update the DNS record.. Option D is correct because using AWS Systems Manager Automation to create an AMI, launch a new instance, and update DNS allows a controlled replacement with minimal downtime. Option A is wrong because in-place patching requires downtime. Option B is wrong because AWS Patch Manager can patch in-place but still requires reboot. Option C is wrong because Auto Scaling with two instances would work but the architecture is single-tier.

Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager to apply patches during a maintenance window.

Answer

Create a second instance in the Auto Scaling group and detach the original.

Answer

Apply patches in-place using yum update and reboot the instance.

Question 8

An SAP system uses a Network Load Balancer (NLB) to distribute traffic to SAP application servers. The application servers are in private subnets. The operations team notices that the health checks are failing for one of the application servers. The health check is configured to use TCP on port 3200. The application server's security group allows inbound traffic on port 3200 from the NLB's subnet CIDR. The network ACL allows inbound and outbound traffic on ephemeral ports. What is the most likely cause of the health check failure?

Accepted Answer

The security group does not allow inbound traffic from the NLB's private IP addresses.. Option C is correct because the NLB health checks originate from its own IP addresses, not from the client IPs. The security group must allow traffic from the NLB's private IP addresses. Option A is wrong because the application may be listening correctly. Option B is wrong because NACLs are properly configured. Option D is wrong because the NLB communicates with targets using their private IPs.

Answer

The network ACL is blocking the health check traffic.

Answer

The SAP application is not listening on port 3200.

Answer

The NLB is configured to use the instance's public IP address.

Question 9

A company has an SAP HANA database running on an RDS for SAP HANA instance. The operations team wants to automate the backup process and retain backups for 90 days. Which AWS service should they use?

Accepted Answer

AWS Backup. Option A is correct because AWS Backup can manage backups of RDS instances with customizable retention. Option B is wrong because S3 is for object storage, not native RDS backups. Option C is wrong because Storage Gateway is for hybrid storage. Option D is wrong because RDS automated backups have a max retention of 35 days; manual snapshots are needed beyond that, but AWS Backup can manage them.

Answer

RDS automated backups

Answer

Amazon S3 lifecycle policies

Answer

AWS Storage Gateway

Question 10

An SAP system on AWS uses a Multi-AZ deployment for the database layer with synchronous replication. The application servers are in the same region but different Availability Zones. During a recent failure of the primary database instance, the automatic failover to the standby instance took longer than expected, exceeding the RTO of 5 minutes. Upon investigation, the team finds that the standby instance was not fully synchronized at the time of failure. What could be the cause?

Accepted Answer

The network latency between the Availability Zones is high.. Option C is correct because if the network latency between Availability Zones is high, synchronous replication can cause the primary to wait for acknowledgment, slowing down transactions and causing the standby to lag. Option A is wrong because Multi-AZ does not have a single point of failure for network. Option B is wrong because EBS volume performance affects both instances. Option D is wrong because security groups do not cause replication lag.

Answer

The EBS volumes on the standby instance have lower IOPS than the primary.

Answer

The Multi-AZ configuration uses a single network interface.

Answer

The security groups on the standby instance block replication traffic.

Question 11

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 ALB has a target group with health checks configured on port 8080. Recently, the operations team noticed that some instances are being deregistered due to health check failures. The instances are healthy and the Web Dispatcher is running. The health check response time is consistently below 2 seconds. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The health check interval is too short, causing the threshold to be exceeded.. Option B is correct because the health check threshold may be set too low, causing false positives. Option A is wrong because if the path were wrong, all health checks would fail. Option C is wrong because the ALB health checks come from its own IPs, not the internet. Option D is wrong if the instances are healthy.

Answer

The security group for the instances blocks inbound traffic from the internet.

Answer

The instances are running out of memory.

Answer

The health check path is incorrect.

Question 12

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 13

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 14

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 15

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