PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
An SAP system on AWS is experiencing performance degradation. The CloudWatch metrics show that the EBS volumes used for the HANA data files have an average queue length of 10 and average latency of 50 ms. What is the most likely cause?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse high queue length with a snapshot or encryption issue, but AWS explicitly documents that queue length and latency are the primary indicators of IOPS exhaustion, not of background operations like snapshots or encryption.
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 EBS volume's provisioned IOPS are insufficient for the workload.
An average EBS queue length of 10 and average latency of 50 ms indicate that the volume is saturated with I/O requests. The queue length persistently exceeds the recommended threshold (typically <1 for optimal performance), and latency spikes above the 1–10 ms range for gp3 or io2 volumes. This directly points to insufficient provisioned IOPS for the SAP HANA workload, causing requests to queue up and wait for service.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
EBS encryption is causing additional overhead.
Why it's wrong here
Encryption overhead is negligible.
- ✗
EBS snapshots are being taken too frequently.
Why it's wrong here
Snapshots may cause brief latency but not sustained queue depth.
- ✓
The EBS volume's provisioned IOPS are insufficient for the workload.
Why this is correct
Insufficient IOPS cause queuing and increased latency.
- ✗
EBS optimization is not enabled on the instance.
Why it's wrong here
EBS optimization is enabled by default on current generation instances.
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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.