SAP-C03 practice question: Safe remediation, auto scaling and automatic recovery (1 of 2)
Operational Excellence and Automation A free question from our original SAP-C03 practice exam. Try it, then open the answer to see why each option is right or wrong.
A payment processor uses an automated remediation to restart application instances when a health alarm fires. During a database slowdown, the remediation restarted hundreds of instances within minutes, which made the outage worse and overloaded the database when the instances reconnected.
The operations team wants the remediation to keep repairing single-instance failures, but to stop acting when failures are widespread, and it wants every automated action limited in rate and recorded for review. A person must be notified when the automation stops.
Which design meets these requirements?
Choose one answer.
AA. Keep the restart rule as it is, and add a second EventBridge rule that restarts the instances again whenever the first restart fails, so that every instance is eventually repaired without a person.
BB. Start a Systems Manager Automation runbook from EventBridge with maximum concurrency and maximum errors set, and have it check a DynamoDB counter that opens a circuit breaker and notifies on-call.
CC. Remove the automatic restart, and have an engineer restart each failed instance by hand from the console as soon as the alarm fires.
DD. Replace the restart with an automatic scale-out of the fleet by 50 percent whenever any health alarm fires, so that the healthy instances take the extra work.
Show the answer and explanation
Answer: B
A. Wrong: A second restart rule adds more restarts during the same incident and makes the overload worse. The option has no limit on rate and no stop when failures are widespread.
B. Right: Correct. The runbook limits how many instances run at once and stops on errors, and the counter in DynamoDB holds a circuit breaker that halts restarts when failures are widespread. The on-call team is notified, and each action is recorded in the automation history.
C. Wrong: A manual restart is safe but slow, and it does not repair single-instance failures automatically. The team wants the automation to keep working for those cases.
D. Wrong: Scaling out during a database slowdown adds more connections to the overloaded database. The option does not limit the actions or stop them when failures are widespread.
Explanation
A Systems Manager runbook with concurrency and error limits, plus a DynamoDB circuit breaker that halts restarts and notifies on-call when failures are widespread, keeps single-instance repairs while preventing a restart storm. Extra restart rules, manual-only repair and scale-out during a database slowdown each miss a safety requirement.
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