PAS-C01 Operations and Maintenance Practice Question
An SAP administrator notices that the SAP HANA database is experiencing high I/O latency. The database is running on an EC2 instance with EBS volumes. What is the MOST effective initial step to diagnose the I/O bottleneck?
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
✓
Check the EBS volume queue length in CloudWatch
The first step to diagnose the I/O bottleneck is to check the EBS volume queue length metric in CloudWatch. A high queue length indicates that the volume is saturated and I/O requests are waiting. Option B is incorrect because simply increasing volume size may raise baseline performance but does not directly diagnose the bottleneck and could be wasteful. Option C is incorrect because switching to instance store volumes is not a diagnostic step and may not be suitable for persistent data. Option D is incorrect because enabling detailed monitoring provides more granular metrics but does not directly indicate I/O saturation; the queue length metric is the key diagnostic.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Check the EBS volume queue length in CloudWatch
Why this is correct
High queue length indicates the volume is overwhelmed, leading to latency.
- ✗
Increase the size of the EBS volumes
Why it's wrong here
Resizing may not address the root cause and could be premature without diagnosis.
- ✗
Switch to instance store volumes
Why it's wrong here
Instance store is ephemeral and not suitable for persistent data like HANA.
- ✗
Enable detailed monitoring on the EC2 instance
Why it's wrong here
Detailed monitoring increases metric frequency but does not directly identify I/O bottlenecks.
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