Chapter 8 Cloud Management Baselines, Performance & SLAs

Question 1

The ____ measurements are used to detail resource usage under normal operations.

Answer 1

baseline

Question 2

A ____ is data collected from an object.

Answer 2

metric

Question 3

Cloud components that data can be gathered from are referred to as ____.

Answer 3

objects

Question 4

____ scaling is adding capacity by deploying additional servers.

Answer 4

Horizontal

Horizontal scaling is the process of adding cloud capacity by expanding your current server fleet by adding systems, compared to vertical scaling, which is replacing servers with a larger instance that meets your requirements.

Chapter 8 (page 254)

Question 5

Reducing swap file usage can be accomplished by adding additional ____.

Answer 5

memory

Question 6

Network delays and slowdowns are an indication of high network ____.

Answer 6

latency

Question 7

The ability of cloud resources to scale up and down is referred to as ____.

Answer 7

resiliency

Question 8

The service provider outlines their performance guarantees in a ____ ____ ____.

Answer 8

service level agreement (SLA)

Question 9

____ ____ is the process of replacing a single machine image with a larger, more powerful image.

Answer 9

Vertical scaling

Question 10

For regulatory or corporate compliance requirements, you may be required to implement an ongoing ____ process and retain the data for record retention requirements.

Answer 10

auditing

Chapter 8 (page 247)

Question 11

To collect metrics, you set up your management application measure what?

Answer 11

objects

Question 12

Name the visual representation of your current cloud operations.

Answer 12

dashboard

Cloud dashboards are incredibly useful and informative. It is common to display dashboard in operations centers or overhead in office environments to give an easy-to-read overview of operations.

Chapter 8 ( page 256)

Question 13

Rhonda is creating a change management plan to increase the processing abilities of one of her middleware application servers. What components can she upgrade to increase server processing performance?

Answer 13

CPU

Many applications are CPU bound which is to say their performance depends on the amount of CPU resources available. One of the most common cloud objects that are tracked is the percentage of CPU utilization, since it has a direct impact on systems’ performance.

Chapter 8 (page 247)

Question 14

A set of application server instances is suffering poor performance, Brian notices that there is a lot of pagefile thrashing to the ephemeral SSD drives. You are brought in to investigate the instance configuration. What resource pool would you recommend changing to help resolve the application performance problem

Answer 14

Memory

When RAM utilization reaches 100 percent on a server, the operating system will begin to access the swap file and cause a serious performance slowdowns that affects all processes running on the server. Monitoring memory usage is one of the most critical objects to monitor and collect baseline data on.

Chapter 8 (page 249)

Question 15

A video hosting company has just released a popular movie for download. As soon as the announcement is made, all of the Internet-facing content servers became very slow. What resource pool increase would most likely resolve the issue?

Answer 15

Network I/O

Question 16

What two formats are cloud-based reports generally presented in?

Answer 16

PDF and Excel

There is a close relationship between collecting data into baselines and then measuring them against your SLA to ensure compliance. Management services allow you to compare these two metrics and generate reports that can be used to analyze trends, identify problems, and store data for regulatory or corporate compliance purposes. These reports can be exported in many formats including PDF and Excel documents.

Chapter 8 (page 255)

Question 17

Object tracking should be aligned with which service provider document that outlines guaranteed performance metrics?

Answer 17

Service level agreement (SLA)

By collecting actual data you can compare it to the offered service levels outlined in the SLA and ensure that the guaranteed metrics are being met.

Chapter 8 (page 251)

Question 18

When monitoring performance metrics on one of your servers, you notice that the server is utilizing 100 percent of the network bandwidth available to it. What modifications could you make to the server that will most likely address the problem?

A. Add memory to the system
B. Install a second network adapter.
C. Update the network adapter’s firmware.
D. Install a second processor.

Answer 18

Install a second network adapter

If a server is using all of its network bandwidth, then the most logical solution is to add more. You can do this by installing a second network adapter and connecting it to a different subnet. The other solution could conceivably address the problem, but the success is less likely.

Question 19

Which of the following is not a statistic that you would typically find in a server performance baseline?

A.  CPU utilization
B.  Disk transfer rate
C.  Network transmissions speed
D.  OS update history
E.  Memory utilization

Answer 19

OS update history

Performance baselines characterize hardware performance, so the OS update history would be of little or no use for future comparisons. A server baseline typically consists of CPU, memory, disk, and network performance statistics.

Question 20

What type of scaling involves replacing an existing server with another that has more capabilities?

A.  Horizontal
B.  Round-robin
C.  Elasticity
D.  Autoscale
E.  Vertical

Answer 20

Vertical

Vertical scaling is the process of upgrading or replacing a server with one that has greater capabilities.

Question 21

Incident reports include which of the following? (Choose three.)

A.  Trouble tickets
B.  SLAs
C.  Scaling
D.  Support engagements
E.  Outages

Answer 21

Trouble tickets
Support engagements
Outages

Incident reports include events such as opening trouble tickets and contacting customer support and outages. Scaling and service level agreements are not considered impairments.

Tracking support services and impairments will give you insight into the overall reliability of operations, and the collected data can be compared to your SLA to ensure compliance.
Incidents can be defined by your company or the cloud provider as required. Incidents and health reports include trouble tickets opened, support engagements, and any event that causes degradation of your services.

Chapter 8 (page 257)

Question 22

Databases capacity can be added by scaling horizontally.

A. True
B. False

Answer 22

True

Most databases are designed to scale vertically.

Horizontal scaling works well for applications that are designed to work in parallel such as web servers. You keep your existing server instances and add more to increase capacity.

Chapter 8 (page 254)

Question 23

Cloud provider SLAs outline which of the following? (Choose two.)

A.  Device configuration
B.  DNS configuration
C.  Uptime
D.  Network performance
E.  Autocache

Answer 23

Uptime
Network performance

Service level agreements outline performance and availability commitments and not configurations.

Question 24

Reports are often provided to which interested parties? (Choose four.)

A.  Marketing
B.  Management
C.  Cloud provider operations
D.  Accounting
E.  Internal operation centers
F.  Customers

Answer 24

Marketing
Management
Accounting
Internal operation centers

Cloud reporting is intended for internal corporate groups such as marketing, management, accounting, and operations.

Question 25

To collect metrics, you set up your management application to measure what? A. Database B. Server C. Hypervisor D. Objects

Answer 25

Objects Objects are queried to gather metric data.

Question 26

Reports are generated where? A. Hypervisor B. Databases C. Logging servers D. Cloud management and monitoring applications

Answer 26

Cloud management and monitoring applications Cloud reports are formatted collections of data contained in the management or monitoring applications.

Question 27

What is a visual representation of your current cloud operations? A. Operational matrix B. Management console C. Dashboard

Answer 27

Dashboard A dashboard is a configurable graphical representation of current operational data.

Question 28

Upgrading to a newer operating system may require that you update what? A. SLA B. DNS C. Baseline D. VPC

Answer 28

Baseline After performing a major system upgrade, you should collect new baseline data as the overall system performance has changed.

Question 29

Capacity and utilization reporting often contains data on which of the following object? (Choose three.) ``` A. CPU B. OS version C. Volume tier D. RAM E. Network ```

Answer 29

CPU RAM Network CPU, RAM, and network utilization are all important object to manage for capacity and utilization tracking. Storage volume tiers and OS versions do not apply to this scenario.

Question 30

Autoscaling can be configured to which of the following? (Choose four.) ``` A. Add capacity B. Configure time-of-day capacity C. Generate metric reports D. Remove capacity E. Maintain a minimum number of servers F. Track SLA objects G. Perform patch management ```

Answer 30

Add capacity Configure time-of-day capacity Remove capacity Maintain a minimum number of servers Autoscaling allows for adding and removing cloud compute capacity, providing capacity changes based on the time of day, and maintaining a minimum number of VMs. Report generation and SLA object tracking are not autoscaling functions.

Question 31

Cloud-based reports can be generated in which formats? (Choose two.) ``` A. SQL B. PDF C. Python D. JSON E. Excel ```

Answer 31

PDF Excel Both Excel and PDF are the most common reporting formats. The other database, programming, and scripting options are not applicable to report generation.

Question 32

What type of scaling involves adding servers to a pool? ``` A. Horizontal B. Round-robin C. Elasticity D. Autoscale E. Vertical ```

Answer 32

Horizontal Horizontal scaling is the process of adding additional servers for increased capacity. Round-robin is a load-balancing metric and does not apply. Elasticity is the ability to add and remove resource, autoscaling is the automated process of adding and removing capacity, and vertical scaling is expanding a server.

Question 33

Carl has noticed a slowdown in the response times of his SQL database and has been tasked to investigate the root cause of delays. He has decided to configure his monitoring application to gather additional data on what may be the cause of the delays. What are some of the objects you would recommend he collect data on? (Choose three.) ``` A. Read replica I/O B. Load balancer latency C. CPU D. Network packet drops E. Machine image F. SLA ```

Answer 33

Read replica I/O CPU Network packet drop Databases return data from read operations and are a critical performance metric. CPU saturation could cause a slowdown as well as network issues such a packet loss.

Question 34

Object tracking can be helpful in identifying which of the following? (Choose three.) ``` A. Resiliency B. Trends C. Metrics D. ACLs E. Peak usage F. Anomalies ```

Answer 34

Trends Peak usage Anomalies Trends, usage, and deficiencies are all management report outputs that can be identified using object tracking.

Question 35

Rebecca is writing a change management plan to increase the processing abilities of one of her middleware servers. What components can she upgrade to increase server performance? (Choose three.) ``` A. CPU B. SLA C. RAM D. Network I/O E. ACL F. DNS ```

Answer 35

CPU RAM Network I/O Server performance can be increased by adding additional CPU processing, memory, and network capacity. SLA, ACL, and DNS are not related to increasing server capacity.

Question 36

Object tracking should be aligned with which of the following? A. VPC B. SLA C. RDP D. JSON

Answer 36

SLA (service level agreement) Tracking object performance data should match with the guaranteed levels outlined in the service level agreement.

Question 37

High-performance network clusters should share which of the following? (Choose two.) A. Availability zone B. Group cache C. Identity group D. Hypervisor

Answer 37

Availability zone Identity group Hypervisor High-performance computing relies on the servers being in close proximity to reduce network and storage latency. Being in the same availability zone, in the same group, and on the same hypervisor accomplishes this. There is no such thing as a group cache.