Amazon Exam DBS-C01 Topic 5 Question 93 Discussion

Correct Answer: C

Explanation from Amazon documents:

Amazon RDS for Oracle is a fully managed relational database service that supports Oracle Database. Amazon RDS for Oracle provides several features to monitor the performance and health of your database, such as RDS Performance Insights, Enhanced Monitoring, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS CloudTrail.

RDS Performance Insights is a feature that helps you quickly assess the load on your database and determine when and where to take action. RDS Performance Insights displays a dashboard that shows the database load in terms of average active sessions (AAS), which is the average number of sessions that are actively running SQL statements at any given time. RDS Performance Insights also shows the top SQL statements, waits, hosts, and users that are contributing to the database load.

Enhanced Monitoring is a feature that provides metrics in real time for the operating system (OS) that your DB instance runs on. Enhanced Monitoring metrics include CPU utilization, memory, file system, disk I/O, network I/O, process list, and thread count. Enhanced Monitoring allows you to view how different threads use the CPU and how much memory each thread consumes.

By enabling RDS Performance Insights and Enhanced Monitoring for the RDS for Oracle DB instance, the database specialist can monitor the latency of the database with the least operational overhead. This solution will allow the database specialist to use the RDS console or API to enable these features and view the metrics and dashboards without installing any additional software or tools. This solution will also provide comprehensive and granular information about the database load and resource utilization.

Therefore, option C is the correct solution to meet the requirement. Option A is not optimal because publishing RDS Performance Insights metrics to Amazon CloudWatch and adding AWS CloudTrail filters to monitor database performance will incur additional operational overhead and cost. Amazon CloudWatch is a service that collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events. AWS CloudTrail is a service that records AWS API calls for your account and delivers log files to you. These services are useful for monitoring performance trends and auditing activities, but they are not necessary for monitoring latency in real time. Option B is not optimal because installing Oracle Statspack and enabling the performance statistics feature will require manual intervention and configuration on the RDS for Oracle DB instance. Oracle Statspack is a tool that collects, stores, and displays performance data for Oracle Database. The performance statistics feature is an option that enables Statspack to collect additional statistics such as wait events, latches, SQL statements, segments, rollback segments, etc. These tools are useful for performance tuning and troubleshooting, but they are not as easy to use as RDS Performance Insights and Enhanced Monitoring. Option D is not relevant because creating a new DB parameter group that includes the AllocatedStorage, DBInstanceClassMemory, and DBInstanceVCPU variables will not help monitor the latency of the database. A DB parameter group is a collection of DB engine configuration values that define how a DB instance operates. The AllocatedStorage parameter specifies the allocated storage size in gibibytes (GiB). The DBInstanceClassMemory parameter specifies the amount of memory available to an instance class in bytes. The DBInstanceVCPU parameter specifies the number of virtual CPUs available to an instance class. These parameters are used to configure the capacity and performance of a DB instance, but they do not provide any monitoring or metrics information. Enabling RDS Performance Insights alone will not provide enough information about the OS-level metrics such as CPU utilization or memory usage.