AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 928

An Application performs read-heavy operations on an Amazon Aurora DB instance. A SysOps Administrator monitors the CPUUtilization CloudWatch metric and has recently seen it increase to 90%. The Administrator would like to understand what is driving the CPU surge.
Which of the following should the Administrator additionally monitor to understand the CPU surge?

Answer options

• A. FreeableMemory and DatabaseConnections to understand the amount of available RAM and number of connections to DB instance.
• B. FreeableMemory and EngineUptime to understand the amount of available RAM and the amount of time the instance has been up and running.
• C. DatabaseConnections and AuroraReplicaLag for the number of connections to the DB instance and the amount of lag when replicating updates from the primary instance.
• D. DatabaseConnections and InsertLatency for the number of connections to the DB instance and latency for insert queries.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

To diagnose a CPU utilization surge on an Amazon Aurora DB instance, monitoring DatabaseConnections helps determine if a sudden influx of client sessions is consuming resources, while InsertLatency reveals if write operations are stalling and driving up CPU cycles. Other metrics like EngineUptime or AuroraReplicaLag are less directly related to identifying the source of CPU consumption spikes caused by application queries and connection load.