DBS-C01 Management and Operations Practice Question
A company is using Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ deployment. The database experiences a failover event, and after failover, the application reports increased latency. Which action should the database specialist take to diagnose the issue?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently assume increased latency after failover is always due to resource exhaustion or a need to reset connections, overlooking the common root cause of DNS caching and stale client connections routing to the wrong AZ.
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
✓
Check Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Database Connections and Latency, and verify DNS resolution.
After a Multi-AZ failover, the DNS record for the RDS endpoint is updated to point to the new primary in a different Availability Zone. If the application's DNS cache still resolves to the old IP (which is now unreachable or in a different AZ), connections may time out or route suboptimally, increasing latency. Checking CloudWatch metrics for Database Connections and Latency helps isolate whether the issue is due to connection churn, resource contention, or DNS caching, while verifying DNS resolution confirms the application is connecting to the correct endpoint.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Check Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Database Connections and Latency, and verify DNS resolution.
Why this is correct
Monitoring metrics and DNS can pinpoint the cause of increased latency.
- ✗
Promote the secondary instance to primary manually.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ failover is automatic; manual promotion is not needed.
- ✗
Create a new read replica and redirect traffic.
Why it's wrong here
A read replica does not resolve the latency issue from DNS caching.
- ✗
Force a reboot of the DB instance to reset connections.
Why it's wrong here
A reboot does not address DNS caching issues.
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