DBS-C01 Monitoring and Troubleshooting Practice Question
A company runs a critical application on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with a Multi-AZ deployment. The application experiences intermittent connection timeouts and slow query performance. The CloudWatch metrics show that the 'ReadLatency' and 'WriteLatency' metrics are elevated during peak hours. The 'CPUUtilization' is consistently below 30%, and 'DatabaseConnections' is within limits. The 'BurstBalance' for the gp2 storage is frequently dropping to 0%. The DB instance is a db.r5.large with 300 GB of gp2 storage. The company wants to resolve the latency issues without significant cost increase. Which solution should the company implement?
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
✓
Increase the allocated storage to 600 GB to increase baseline IOPS.
Increasing the allocated storage to 600 GB increases the baseline IOPS of gp2 from 900 (at 300 GB) to 1800 (at 600 GB), reducing reliance on burst credits and resolving the latency issue. This is cost-effective compared to switching to io1 (Option C), which would incur higher costs for 3000 provisioned IOPS. Option A (adding a read replica) does not help with write latency, and Option B (enabling Performance Insights) only aids diagnosis, not resolution.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Add a read replica to offload read traffic.
Why it's wrong here
Read replicas help with read latency, but the issue includes write latency.
- ✗
Enable Performance Insights to identify the root cause.
Why it's wrong here
Performance Insights is a diagnostic tool, not a solution to the bottleneck.
- ✗
Switch the storage type to io1 with 3000 provisioned IOPS.
Why it's wrong here
io1 costs more than gp2; increasing gp2 size is cheaper.
- ✓
Increase the allocated storage to 600 GB to increase baseline IOPS.
Why this is correct
Larger gp2 volumes have higher baseline IOPS, reducing burst credit depletion.
Visual reference
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
One of 1,663 original DBS-C01 practice questions on Courseiva, each with a full explanation and wrong-answer analysis — not exam dumps or protected exam content. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
Same concept, more angles
1 more way this is tested on DBS-C01
These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.
Variation 1. A company is using Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ deployment. The application team reports that write latency has increased significantly over the past hour. CloudWatch shows elevated 'ReadLatency' and 'WriteLatency' metrics. The DB instance is a db.r5.large with 500 GB General Purpose SSD (gp2) storage. Which action is most likely to resolve the issue?
medium- A.Enable Multi-AZ deployment
- B.Create a read replica to offload read traffic
- ✓ C.Increase the allocated storage size to 1,000 GB
- D.Scale up the DB instance class to db.r5.xlarge
Why C: Elevated latency with gp2 storage often indicates exhausted I/O credits, and increasing storage size raises the baseline IOPS. Option A is incorrect because Multi-AZ is already deployed. Option B is incorrect because read replicas do not reduce write latency. Option D is incorrect because instance class scaling does not directly affect storage IOPS.
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.