PAS-C01 Operations and Maintenance Practice Test 38 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company runs SAP HANA on a single EC2 instance with 4 TB of memory. The operations team needs to perform an operating system patch that requires a reboot. They want to minimize downtime and ensure the HANA database is gracefully stopped and started. Which sequence of actions should they take?

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

Accepted Answer

Stop the HANA database, stop the EC2 instance, apply the patch, start the instance, start the HANA database. The correct sequence involves gracefully stopping the SAP HANA database before stopping the EC2 instance, then applying the patch, starting the instance, and finally starting the database. This ensures data integrity and minimizes downtime by avoiding an unclean shutdown.

Answer

Stop the EC2 instance, apply the patch, start the instance, and let HANA start automatically

Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager to apply the patch and reboot automatically without manual HANA shutdown

Answer

Apply the patch while the instance is running, then reboot the instance

Question 2

A company runs a critical SAP HANA database on an Amazon EC2 X1 instance. The operations team needs to monitor the database and receive alerts when memory utilization exceeds 90% for more than 5 minutes. The team wants to use AWS native services and minimize custom development. Which solution should the team implement?

Accepted Answer

Install the Amazon CloudWatch agent on the EC2 instance to collect memory metrics, create a CloudWatch alarm with a threshold of 90% for 5 minutes, and configure an Amazon SNS topic for notifications.. The CloudWatch agent is required to collect memory metrics from EC2 instances because default CloudWatch metrics do not include memory utilization. Once the agent is installed, you can create an alarm on the memory metric with a 90% threshold over 5 minutes and use SNS for notifications. This approach uses native AWS services and requires minimal custom development, making it the most efficient solution.

Answer

Use AWS CloudTrail to monitor memory utilization and configure an Amazon EventBridge rule to send alerts.

Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter to monitor memory utilization and create an OpsItem when the threshold is breached.

Answer

Enable detailed monitoring on the EC2 instance and create a CloudWatch alarm for the MemoryUtilization metric.

Question 3

An SAP Basis team runs SAP NetWeaver on AWS and needs near-real-time visibility into the health and performance of the EC2 instances, EBS volumes, and the underlying SAP application metrics. They want a single AWS service that can collect and visualize these metrics without managing servers. Which AWS service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch. Amazon CloudWatch is the AWS-native monitoring service that ingests infrastructure metrics and, via the CloudWatch agent, custom SAP application metrics. It supports dashboards, alarms, and near-real-time visibility without requiring the team to manage monitoring servers. The other services focus on API auditing, configuration compliance, or advisory checks, none of which deliver the required performance telemetry.

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Answer

AWS Trusted Advisor

Answer

AWS Config

Question 4

A company runs SAP NetWeaver on AWS and wants to ensure that its EC2 instances are patched with the latest security updates on a regular basis. The operations team wants to minimize manual effort and have a centralized view of patch compliance. Which AWS service should be used to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager. AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager is designed to automate patching of EC2 instances and provides a centralized compliance dashboard. It supports scheduled patching and can target instances by tags. Other services either only assess compliance or require more manual setup.

Answer

AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise

Answer

Amazon Inspector

Answer

AWS Config

Question 5

A company runs SAP NetWeaver on AWS and uses an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to distribute traffic to multiple SAP application servers. The operations team needs to ensure that the ALB routes traffic only to healthy application servers. The SAP application servers expose an HTTP endpoint at /sap/public/ping that returns HTTP 200 when the server is healthy. Which configuration should the team apply to the ALB target group?

Accepted Answer

Configure the target group health check to use the HTTP protocol, path /sap/public/ping, and a success code of 200.. The ALB target group health check should use HTTP with the path /sap/public/ping and expect a 200 response. This configuration aligns with SAP's standard health check endpoint and ensures that the ALB only routes traffic to application servers that are fully operational. It provides accurate health status at the application layer.

Answer

Configure the target group health check to use the HTTPS protocol, path /sap/public/ping, and a success code of 200.

Answer

Configure the target group health check to use the TCP protocol on port 3200 and rely on TCP connection success.

Answer

Configure the target group health check to use the HTTP protocol, path /sap/public/ping, and a success code of 301.

Question 6

A company runs SAP NetWeaver on AWS and wants to automate the patching of the underlying Amazon EC2 instances for both Linux and Windows operating systems. The operations team needs a centralized service that can apply patches on a schedule and report compliance. Which AWS service should be used?

Accepted Answer

AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager. AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager provides a centralized, automated way to patch EC2 instances running Linux and Windows. It integrates with maintenance windows to schedule patching and with Systems Manager Compliance to report on patch status. This makes it the ideal service for automating patching in an SAP on AWS environment, reducing manual effort and ensuring consistency.

Answer

AWS Config

Answer

AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise

Answer

Amazon Inspector

Question 7

A company runs SAP NetWeaver ABAP on a single AWS account with EC2 instances across two Availability Zones. The operations team must receive an alert whenever the CPU utilization of any EC2 instance tagged with the key "SAPSystem" and value "PRD" exceeds 85% for five consecutive minutes. Which AWS service should be used to detect this condition and trigger the notification?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch. The requirement is a performance-metric threshold with a sustained duration and a notification action. Amazon CloudWatch metric alarms evaluate EC2 metrics such as CPUUtilization over configurable periods, support tag-based scoping, and integrate with Amazon SNS for alerting. The other services handle auditing, best-practice checks, or configuration compliance, none of which can evaluate live CPU utilization against an 85% threshold.

Answer

AWS Config

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Answer

AWS Trusted Advisor

Question 8

A company runs an SAP HANA database on an Amazon EC2 instance with 4 TB of memory. The database is used for a critical production system. The operations team needs to create a consistent backup of the HANA database to Amazon S3 with minimal impact on the running system. Which AWS service or feature should be used to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

AWS Backint Agent for SAP HANA. AWS Backint Agent for SAP HANA is the AWS-native solution for backing up HANA databases to Amazon S3. It uses SAP HANA's backint API to ensure application-consistent backups and streams data directly to S3, minimizing impact on the database. It supports full, differential, and log backups, and integrates with HANA's backup catalog. This makes it the ideal choice for consistent, low-impact backups to S3.

Answer

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots

Answer

SAP HANA Studio backup to a file system mounted on Amazon FSx for Lustre

Answer

AWS Backup for SAP HANA

Question 9

A company runs SAP S/4HANA on an Amazon EC2 instance. The operations team wants to be proactively notified whenever the average CPU utilization of the instance exceeds 85% for 10 consecutive minutes, and they need the notification delivered to an email address. The monitoring solution must use native AWS services and require minimal administrative overhead. Which combination of AWS services should be used to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch with a CPU utilization alarm that publishes to an Amazon SNS topic with an email subscription.. Amazon CloudWatch is the AWS-native service for collecting and monitoring EC2 metrics. A CloudWatch alarm can evaluate CPU utilization over a specified period and trigger an action when the threshold is crossed. Publishing to Amazon SNS with an email subscription provides immediate notification. This combination requires no agents or custom code for basic EC2 metrics, meeting the minimal-overhead requirement.

Answer

Amazon Inspector with a continuous assessment template, and an Amazon SNS topic with an email subscription for findings.

Answer

AWS Config with a custom rule that evaluates CPU utilization, and an Amazon EventBridge rule that invokes an AWS Lambda function to send an email.

Answer

AWS CloudTrail with a trail that delivers logs to an Amazon S3 bucket, and an S3 event notification that sends an email via Amazon SES.

Question 10

An SAP basis team runs a distributed SAP NetWeaver ABAP system on AWS with separate EC2 instances for the central services instance (ASCS), the database, and multiple application servers. The ASCS instance and the database instance must be started in a specific order whenever the landscape is powered on after a maintenance window. The team wants to orchestrate this startup sequence automatically and receive an alert if any step fails. Which approach should they use?

Accepted Answer

Create an AWS Systems Manager Automation runbook that defines the ordered steps, invoke it with a schedule, and configure Amazon CloudWatch alarms on the automation execution status.. Ordered startup of a distributed SAP landscape requires a workflow engine that can execute steps sequentially, wait for completion, and surface failures. AWS Systems Manager Automation provides exactly this with runbooks, and it integrates with EventBridge for scheduling and CloudWatch or SNS for alerting. Instance-level primitives such as StartInstances or state-change events do not understand SAP service readiness and cannot enforce the database-before-ASCS dependency.

Answer

Configure an AWS Lambda function that calls the EC2 StartInstances API for all instances in a single call and rely on the EC2 service to order the starts.

Answer

Create an Amazon EventBridge rule that triggers on EC2 instance state-change notifications and starts the next instance when the previous one enters the running state.

Answer

Use an Auto Scaling group with a launch template for each instance and set the desired capacity to 1 for all groups at the same time.

Question 11

A company runs SAP NetWeaver on AWS and uses an Amazon RDS for SQL Server database for the SAP database. The operations team needs to perform a minor version upgrade of the SQL Server database with minimal downtime. The database is configured with Multi-AZ. Which action should they take?

Accepted Answer

Modify the RDS instance to apply the minor version upgrade during the next maintenance window, which will automatically fail over to the standby.. For an RDS for SQL Server Multi-AZ deployment, minor version upgrades can be applied with minimal downtime by modifying the instance and scheduling the upgrade. RDS upgrades the standby first, then fails over, resulting in only a brief interruption. This is the standard, supported method for minor version upgrades.

Answer

Manually apply the SQL Server service pack on the underlying EC2 instance that hosts the RDS database.

Answer

Use AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) to migrate the database to a new RDS instance with the upgraded minor version.

Answer

Take a snapshot of the RDS instance, restore it to a new instance with the new minor version, and then update the SAP application to point to the new endpoint.

Question 12

A company runs SAP HANA on a single EC2 instance with 4 TB of memory. The operations team needs to perform an operating system patch that requires a reboot. They want to minimize downtime and ensure the HANA database is gracefully stopped and started. Which sequence of actions should they take?

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

Accepted Answer

An IAM role attached to the EC2 instance with permissions to the target S3 bucket, and the AWS Backint Agent installed and configured on the HANA host.. AWS Backint Agent is the SAP-supported integration that lets HANA back up directly to Amazon S3. It needs AWS credentials to sign S3 requests, and the recommended approach is an IAM role attached to the EC2 instance so no static keys reside on the host. The agent must also be installed and pointed at the correct bucket and prefix. Mounted file systems, anonymous policies, or gateway appliances do not provide the direct, authenticated S3 access the agent requires.

Answer

An S3 bucket policy that allows anonymous PutObject requests from the VPC endpoint, and the agent installed with default settings.

Answer

Amazon FSx for Lustre mounted at the HANA backup directory, with a data repository association to the S3 bucket.

Answer

AWS Storage Gateway file gateway mounted on the HANA host, with the agent configured to write to the mounted file share.

Question 13

A company runs SAP NetWeaver on AWS and wants to improve the operational resilience of its SAP application servers. The application servers are behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) and run on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The operations team needs to ensure that unhealthy application servers are automatically replaced and that the replacement instances are correctly registered with the ALB. Which TWO configurations should be implemented to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Configure the Auto Scaling group to use the ALB target group's health check as the health check type.. To automatically replace unhealthy SAP application servers and ensure replacements are registered with the ALB, the Auto Scaling group must use the ALB target group's health checks and have the target group attached. These two configurations together provide end-to-end health monitoring and automatic registration, eliminating manual intervention and ensuring high availability.

Answer

Configure a scheduled scaling policy to replace all instances every night, and use the ALB to drain connections before termination.

Answer

Create a lifecycle hook that sends a notification to an Amazon SNS topic when an instance is terminating, and use a Lambda function to deregister the instance from the target group.

Answer

Enable Elastic Load Balancing health checks on the EC2 instances and configure the Auto Scaling group to use EC2 status checks as the health check type.

Question 14

A company runs SAP S/4HANA on AWS with a single SAP HANA database EC2 instance using Amazon EBS gp3 volumes. During month-end close, users report intermittent slow response times. Amazon CloudWatch metrics show that the EBS volumes consistently reach their provisioned IOPS and throughput limits during these periods. The company wants to increase performance with minimal application downtime and without changing the instance type. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Modify the EBS volumes to increase provisioned IOPS and throughput, then apply the changes while the volumes are attached.. The symptoms point to EBS volume-level throttling, not instance-level limits. Amazon EBS gp3 volumes let you raise IOPS and throughput independently, and these changes can be applied online to attached volumes. That resolves the bottleneck with no downtime and no instance change. RAID 0, Multi-Attach, and instance store either require disruptive migration, do not raise volume limits, or sacrifice durability, so they are not appropriate here.

Answer

Enable EBS Multi-Attach on the existing volumes so that multiple Nitro instances can share the I/O workload.

Answer

Create a RAID 0 array from multiple EBS volumes and migrate the HANA data and log files to the array.

Answer

Move the HANA database to an instance store volume to eliminate the EBS performance bottleneck.

Question 15

An SAP S/4HANA production system runs on AWS with a primary application server and an additional application server behind a Network Load Balancer. Users report intermittent session logouts when they are routed to different application servers during a single logon session. The SAP system uses logon groups, and the NLB is configured with a TCP listener on port 3200. What is the most likely cause and the correct remediation?

Accepted Answer

The NLB is distributing each new TCP connection independently; enable sticky sessions on the target group so a client's connections persist to one application server.. SAP GUI sessions span multiple TCP connections, and a Network Load Balancer without stickiness can place each connection on a different application server, invalidating session state and logging users out. Enabling source IP stickiness on the NLB target group keeps a client's connections pinned to one target for the configured duration. Health-check tuning, message server registration, or TLS changes do not provide the connection persistence needed to preserve SAP sessions.

Answer

The NLB health check is misconfigured and marking healthy application servers as unhealthy; change the health check to a TCP check on the SAP message server port.

Answer

The SAP message server is not registered with the NLB; register the message server as a target so clients always resolve the correct application server.

Answer

The NLB listener should use TLS termination instead of TCP passthrough; TLS session resumption will keep the client bound to one application server.