PAS-C01 Operations and Maintenance Practice Question
A company runs a critical SAP HANA database on an m5.24xlarge EC2 instance. The operations team notices that the database performance degrades during peak hours. Which AWS service should be used to identify whether the instance is experiencing CPU throttling due to CPU credit exhaustion?
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
✓
Use CloudWatch to monitor the CPUUtilization metric.
CloudWatch CPUUtilization measures the actual CPU usage of the EC2 instance. For m5 instances, which are dedicated performance instances, there is no CPU credit concept, so monitoring CPUCreditBalance (option D) is irrelevant. The operations team can set a CloudWatch alarm on CPUUtilization to detect when CPU usage is high during peak hours, indicating potential performance degradation. Option A (CloudTrail) logs API calls, not performance metrics. Option B (Trusted Advisor) provides best practice recommendations but does not offer real-time CPU monitoring. Therefore, CloudWatch CPUUtilization is the appropriate service to identify CPU throttling issues.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use CloudTrail to review the EC2 instance launch configuration.
Why it's wrong here
CloudTrail logs API calls, not performance metrics.
- ✗
Use AWS Trusted Advisor to check for instance performance issues.
Why it's wrong here
Trusted Advisor does not provide real-time CPU metrics.
- ✓
Use CloudWatch to monitor the CPUUtilization metric.
Why this is correct
This is the correct metric to identify high CPU usage.
- ✗
Use CloudWatch to monitor the CPUCreditBalance metric.
Why it's wrong here
m5 instances do not use CPU credits.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PAS-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 PAS-C01 exam.