DBS-C01 Monitoring and Troubleshooting Practice Question
A company is running a production Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. The application team reports intermittent high latency and connection timeouts. A quick check shows that the DB instance's CPU utilization is consistently above 90% during peak hours. The database size is 500 GB and the instance class is db.r5.large. Which combination of actions should a database specialist take to resolve the performance issue?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Scale up the DB instance to db.r5.xlarge and review slow query logs to optimize poorly performing queries.
Scaling up the DB instance to db.r5.xlarge provides more compute capacity, directly addressing high CPU utilization. Additionally, reviewing slow query logs helps identify and optimize inefficient queries that may be causing CPU spikes. Option A is incorrect because increasing storage does not improve CPU performance; it only addresses storage capacity or I/O issues. Option C is incorrect because enabling Multi-AZ provides high availability but does not increase compute capacity, and increasing storage does not help with CPU. Option D is incorrect because Performance Insights helps diagnose performance issues but does not resolve them, and CloudWatch alarms only provide notifications without fixing the underlying problem.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the allocated storage to 1 TB and enable auto-scaling for storage.
Why it's wrong here
Storage increase does not improve CPU performance.
- ✓
Scale up the DB instance to db.r5.xlarge and review slow query logs to optimize poorly performing queries.
Why this is correct
Scaling up provides more CPU and memory; slow query logs help identify and fix inefficient queries.
- ✗
Enable Multi-AZ and increase the allocated storage to 1 TB to improve I/O performance.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ does not address CPU utilization; increasing storage does not help CPU.
- ✗
Enable Performance Insights and create a CloudWatch alarm to notify when CPU exceeds 80%.
Why it's wrong here
Monitoring helps but does not resolve the root cause.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DBS-C01 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the DBS-C01 exam.