PAS-C01 Operations and Maintenance Practice Question
This PAS-C01 practice question tests your understanding of operations and maintenance. The scenario asks you to isolate a root cause — eliminate options that address a different problem before choosing. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
Your company runs an SAP ERP system on AWS. The SAP application servers are in an Auto Scaling group across two Availability Zones. The SAP HANA database runs on a single EC2 instance with multiple EBS volumes. Recently, the database instance experienced a failure due to an underlying hardware issue, and you had to recover from an EBS snapshot. The recovery took longer than expected, and management wants to reduce the recovery time objective (RTO). What should you do to achieve a lower RTO for the HANA database?
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Set up SAP HANA System Replication to a secondary instance in a different Availability Zone
A standby HANA instance in a different AZ with replication allows for faster failover, reducing RTO. Option B is the correct action.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
✗
Create more frequent EBS snapshots and store them in Amazon S3
Why it's wrong here
More snapshots improve RPO but not RTO; recovery still requires attaching and restoring.
✗
Increase the size of the EBS volumes and use Provisioned IOPS
Why it's wrong here
This improves performance but does not reduce recovery time from snapshots.
✗
Use an Auto Scaling group for the database instance
Why it's wrong here
Auto Scaling is for stateless instances, not for a stateful database with persistent storage.
✓
Set up SAP HANA System Replication to a secondary instance in a different Availability Zone
Why this is correct
System replication provides a hot standby that can be failed over quickly.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
Many certification questions include familiar terms but test a specific constraint. Read the exact wording before choosing an answer that is generally true but wrong for this case.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
This question should be treated as a scenario, not a definition check. Identify the problem, the constraint and the best action. Then compare each option against those facts.
KKey Concepts to Remember
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
Use explanations to understand the rule behind the answer.
TExam Day Tips
→Underline the problem statement mentally.
→Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
→Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
A media company stores terabytes of video archives that are accessed once a year for audit purposes. Moving these objects to a cold storage tier (Azure Archive, S3 Glacier, or Google Nearline) costs a fraction of hot storage. Questions like this test whether you understand storage tiers, access frequency tradeoffs, and retrieval latency requirements.
What to study next
Got this wrong? Here's your next step.
Identify which PAS-C01 exam domain this question belongs to, then review the specific concept being tested. Practise related questions in that domain and focus on understanding why each wrong answer is tempting — not just why the correct answer is right.
Operations and Maintenance — This question tests Operations and Maintenance — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Set up SAP HANA System Replication to a secondary instance in a different Availability Zone — A standby HANA instance in a different AZ with replication allows for faster failover, reducing RTO. Option B is the correct action.
What should I do if I get this PAS-C01 question wrong?
Identify which PAS-C01 exam domain this question belongs to, then review the specific concept being tested. Practise related questions in that domain and focus on understanding why each wrong answer is tempting — not just why the correct answer is right.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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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.
Question Discussion
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