AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional SAP-C02 Practice Question

The correct answer is to use Amazon RDS Performance Insights to analyze the database load and identify the specific SQL queries contributing to the high CPU utilization. Performance Insights is a specialized database performance tuning and monitoring feature designed to quickly assess the load on a database and determine what is causing it. It visualizes the database load, breaking it down by waits, SQL statements, hosts, or users, which directly helps in pinpointing inefficient or resource-intensive queries that are likely causing the high CPU.

Incorrect options are:

• Scaling up the RDS instance to a larger instance class might provide temporary relief by offering more CPU and memory, but it does not diagnose the underlying problem. An inefficient query could easily consume the resources of a larger instance as well, making this a costly and potentially ineffective solution without first identifying the root cause.
• Implementing Amazon ElastiCache is a valid strategy for improving database performance by offloading read queries. However, implementing a cache without first identifying which queries are causing the load and are suitable for caching is premature. The first step should be to diagnose the bottleneck, not to implement a potential solution blindly.
• Enabling Enhanced Monitoring for the RDS instance provides detailed, real-time OS-level metrics such as CPU breakdown (system, user, idle), memory, and process lists. While this offers more granularity than standard CloudWatch metrics, it does not provide insight into the specific SQL statements causing the database load. Performance Insights is the superior tool for correlating database load directly to specific SQL queries.