PAS-C01 Operations and Maintenance Practice Question
A company runs SAP on AWS and uses an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to distribute traffic to a fleet of EC2 instances running SAP Web Dispatcher. The operations team notices that some instances are failing health checks intermittently. The ALB health check is configured with a 5-second interval, 2 healthy threshold, and 5 unhealthy threshold. The instances are all in the same Auto Scaling group. What is the most likely cause of the intermittent health check failures?
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
✓
The health check path returns a non-200 status periodically due to a short-lived issue
If the health check path returns a non-200 status due to a brief glitch (e.g., temporary resource exhaustion), the ALB will consider the instance unhealthy after 5 consecutive failures (25 seconds). The instances are not being replaced quickly because the Auto Scaling group health check type is likely not set to ELB, or the cooldown period delays replacement.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
The Auto Scaling group health check grace period is too short
Why it's wrong here
A short grace period would cause early failures, but not intermittent failures after being healthy.
- ✗
The ALB health check interval is too long
Why it's wrong here
5 seconds is a standard interval; longer intervals would delay detection, not cause intermittent failures.
- ✗
The health check path returns a 200 status only when the application is fully loaded
Why it's wrong here
If the path requires full load, it would fail consistently, not intermittently.
- ✓
The health check path returns a non-200 status periodically due to a short-lived issue
Why this is correct
Intermittent short-lived issues cause temporary failures; the ALB marks the instance unhealthy after multiple consecutive failures.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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