DVA-C02 Troubleshooting and Optimization Practice Question
A developer is using AWS Elastic Beanstalk to deploy a web application. The application is experiencing high latency. Which TWO steps should the developer take to troubleshoot and optimize the application?
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
✓
Enable AWS X-Ray integration and analyze service maps.
AWS X-Ray integration provides tracing to identify bottlenecks in the application. Option C is correct because enhanced health reporting gives detailed environment health metrics for troubleshooting. Option A is wrong because an RDS read replica is for database read scaling, not directly for latency troubleshooting. Option D is wrong because increasing the instance type is a scaling solution, not a troubleshooting step. Option E is wrong because deploying to a different region does not address latency for existing users.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Configure an Amazon RDS read replica.
Why it's wrong here
An Amazon RDS read replica only offloads read traffic from a primary database instance; it does not address application compute, network, or code-level latency. If the web application is not using RDS, deploying a replica has zero impact on response times. To diagnose latency, you must first identify where the time is spent—DB queries, app code, or infrastructure—rather than adding an unrelated scaling resource.
- ✓
Enable AWS X-Ray integration and analyze service maps.
Why this is correct
Enabling AWS X-Ray on Elastic Beanstalk instruments your application and produces service maps and traces that reveal end-to-end request paths, downstream call latencies, and dependency errors. Analyzing these maps pinpoints slow segments such as API calls, database queries, or third-party services that contribute to user-facing latency. This is precisely the diagnostic step needed to focus on the actual bottleneck in the code or call chain.
- ✓
Enable enhanced health reporting and review the environment health metrics.
Why this is correct
Enhanced health reporting provides environment and per-instance metrics like CPU, memory, request latency, and unhealthy host counts, giving an infrastructure-level view of performance. Reviewing these metrics can show whether latency is caused by resource saturation, such as high CPU utilization or exhausted network connections, rather than by application logic. This top-down approach complements distributed tracing but does not reveal which specific component or call inside the application is slow.
- ✗
Increase the instance type to a larger size.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing the instance type is a capacity optimization, not a diagnostic step. If you scale up before finding the root cause, you may mask a memory leak or a slow query and end up paying more without solving the underlying issue. Troubleshooting latency requires measuring and tracing to identify the bottleneck first; only then can you choose an appropriate, cost-effective fix such as right-sizing, optimizing code, or adding caching.
- ✗
Deploy the application to a different AWS region.
Why it's wrong here
Deploying to a different AWS region only changes where your application runs; it does not diagnose what is causing high latency. It may actually increase latency for users located near the original region, and it introduces additional replication or network hops across regions. A region move is a disaster-recovery or global-distribution decision, not a debugging tactic for an existing performance complaint.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This DVA-C02 question is part of Courseiva's 724-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
Same concept, more angles
1 more way this is tested on DVA-C02
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 runs a Node.js application on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. The application is experiencing high latency. The developer suspects the database queries are slow. Which step should the developer take first to diagnose the issue?
medium- A.Migrate the database to Amazon DynamoDB for better performance.
- ✓ B.Enable enhanced health reporting and monitor CloudWatch metrics for database connection time.
- C.Add database indexing to improve query performance.
- D.Increase the instance size to improve performance.
Why B: The first step to diagnose slow database queries is to monitor and gather data. Enabling enhanced health reporting in Elastic Beanstalk and using CloudWatch metrics allows the developer to analyze database connection times and identify performance bottlenecks (option B). Option A is incorrect because migrating to DynamoDB is a solution, not a diagnostic step, and may not address the root cause. Option C is incorrect because adding database indexing should be based on query analysis, not as a first step without diagnostics. Option D is incorrect because increasing instance size addresses compute resources, not database query performance directly, and should only be considered after identifying the bottleneck.
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DVA-C02 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 DVA-C02 exam.