PAS-C01 Technology Practice Question
An SAP system running on AWS is experiencing high CPU utilization on the database server. The database is SAP HANA running on an r5.8xlarge instance. Which metric in Amazon CloudWatch would best indicate whether the CPU is being consumed by the HANA process or by other OS processes?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates assume the SAP HANA CloudWatch integration (Option B) provides CPU metrics, but it actually focuses on database-level metrics like memory, connection count, and SQL throughput, not per-process OS CPU usage.
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
✓
Custom metrics collected by the CloudWatch agent for the hdbindexserver process
The CloudWatch agent can be configured to collect custom metrics for specific processes, such as hdbindexserver (the main SAP HANA index server process). By monitoring the CPU utilization of this specific process, you can directly determine whether the HANA database process itself is consuming the CPU, as opposed to other OS-level processes like kernel threads, system daemons, or other applications. This granularity is not available from the EC2 instance-level CPUUtilization metric.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
CPUUtilization metric from the EC2 instance
Why it's wrong here
This is the total CPU usage, not per-process.
- ✗
HANA CPU metric from SAP HANA CloudWatch integration
Why it's wrong here
SAP HANA does not publish CPU metrics directly to CloudWatch by default.
- ✗
CPUCreditUsage metric
Why it's wrong here
This is only available for T2/T3 instances.
- ✓
Custom metrics collected by the CloudWatch agent for the hdbindexserver process
Why this is correct
The CloudWatch agent can collect per-process CPU metrics, allowing identification of HANA CPU usage.
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