SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question

A company is using Amazon RDS for MySQL and needs to capture slow query logs for performance tuning. The logs must be stored for 30 days for analysis. What is the MOST cost-effective way to achieve this?

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 slow query logging and stream logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs with a retention policy of 30 days.

The most cost-effective because Amazon RDS for MySQL can natively publish slow query logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs with minimal setup. By setting a retention policy of 30 days in CloudWatch Logs, you avoid additional storage costs and complex configurations. Option B is not directly supported; exporting logs to S3 requires extra steps (e.g., via CloudWatch Logs export) and incurs added cost. Option A adds unnecessary complexity and cost with SQS. Option C is not feasible as RDS does not write slow query logs to EBS by default and snapshotting is not a log management solution.

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

✗
Enable slow query logging and use an RDS event subscription to send logs to an SQS queue for processing.
Why it's wrong here
Event subscriptions are for events, not for streaming logs.
✗
Enable slow query logging and store logs in an S3 bucket with lifecycle policy to delete after 30 days.
Why it's wrong here
RDS does not natively write logs to S3; additional setup is needed.
✗
Enable slow query logging and store logs on the RDS instance's EBS volume, then take daily snapshots.
Why it's wrong here
Logs on EBS volume are not easily accessible and snapshots are costly.
✓
Enable slow query logging and stream logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs with a retention policy of 30 days.
Why this is correct
RDS can publish logs to CloudWatch Logs, where retention is configurable.

Quick reference

AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison

Storage Class	Min Duration	Retrieval	Use Case
S3 Standard	None	Immediate	Frequently accessed data
S3 Standard-IA	30 days	Immediate	Infrequent access, rapid retrieval
S3 One Zone-IA	30 days	Immediate	Non-critical infrequent data
S3 Intelligent-Tiering	None	Immediate–hours	Unknown or changing access patterns
S3 Glacier Instant	90 days	Milliseconds	Archive with instant retrieval
S3 Glacier Flexible	90 days	Minutes–hours	Archive, flexible retrieval
S3 Glacier Deep Archive	180 days	Hours	Long-term compliance archive

Go deeper

SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question

Why each option matters

Option-by-option breakdown

AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison

Related to this question