DOP-C02 Incident and Event Response Practice Question
An application running on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL is experiencing slow query performance. The DevOps team suspects a specific query is causing high CPU usage. Which tool should they use to identify the problematic query?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Enhanced Monitoring (OS-level metrics) with Performance Insights (database-level query analysis), assuming OS metrics alone can identify the specific SQL query, but Enhanced Monitoring lacks the query-level granularity needed to pinpoint the problematic statement.
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
✓
Amazon RDS Performance Insights
Amazon RDS Performance Insights is the correct tool because it provides a database performance tuning and monitoring feature that visualizes database load and lets you identify specific queries causing high CPU usage. It breaks down the database load by wait events, SQL statements, hosts, and users, making it straightforward to pinpoint the problematic query. This directly addresses the DevOps team's need to find the query responsible for high CPU consumption.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Amazon RDS Event Subscriptions
Why it's wrong here
Amazon RDS Event Subscriptions notify you when an instance lifecycle event occurs (such as failover, patching, or storage exhaustion) by sending messages through Amazon SNS, but they do not carry any query-level performance data. They cannot reveal which SQL statements are slow, their execution plans, or their wait events, so they are irrelevant to diagnosing an application experiencing slow database performance.
- ✓
Amazon RDS Performance Insights
Why this is correct
Amazon RDS Performance Insights gives you an at-a-glance dashboard of database load (measured in average active sessions), broken down by wait events, SQL statements, hosts, and users. This allows you to see exactly which query is consuming the most resources and why—whether it is blocked on locks, I/O, or CPU. Its historical and real-time views enable you to pinpoint and correlate the slow query with the performance problem, making it the correct choice for this scenario.
- ✗
Amazon CloudWatch Logs with metric filters
Why it's wrong here
Amazon CloudWatch Logs with metric filters can only work if you first configure the PostgreSQL parameter group to log query durations (e.g., log_min_duration_statement) and streaming logs to CloudWatch Logs. Even then, a metric filter would merely count occurrences of a text pattern, giving you a coarse alert without the ability to drill into query-level load, wait events, or resource contention. This multi-step setup is brittle and fails to offer the direct query analysis that Performance Insights provides.
- ✗
Amazon RDS Enhanced Monitoring
Why it's wrong here
Amazon RDS Enhanced Monitoring uses a lightweight agent on the database host to report OS-level metrics like CPU, memory, file system usage, disk I/O, and network throughput. It does not collect SQL text, execution plans, or per-query runtime statistics, so it can only tell you that the server is busy, not identify which query is responsible. You would still need a separate query-level tool to connect the observed resource saturation to a specific slow SQL statement.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DOP-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 DOP-C02 exam.