Disappointed with the quality of the questions …

[fernando-6]

I’ve used several Tutorial Dojo practice exams before, and I’ve never complained. But this set for “AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional” has so many questions that are incorrect or ambiguous, that I’m tired of creating individual issues. I hate to say it, but it looks like quality control and effort went down a bit in this one. Many questions simply hyperfocus on a specific line of a document or blog, and use that to decide a correct answer. Often times that line is further clarified later in the AWS documentation, changing it’s meaning. Or sometimes another product (in another answer option) also serves the same purpose even better, but just didn’t happen to use the exact same set of words copy/pasted. I opened issues for a couple example, but honestly there were a few others that I just didn’t have the patience to.

I also think that if you really want feedback, you should make it much easier to provide immediate feedback on the questions. Even a simple rating option at the end of the questions might call your attention to problems, when many people downgrade the same question. But having to open a separate window, take a screenshot, than create a separate issue in this forum is not worth the time.

I hope that the wrong questions will still serve the purpose to refresh my memory on the overall topic, using the links provide. TutorialDojo still does a good job at that. But the ability to accurately predict my score is gone.

[alexander.friesen]

Fully agree.

Example:

A retail company hosts its web application on an Auto Scaling group of Amazon EC2 instances deployed across multiple Availability Zones. The Auto Scaling group is configured to maintain a minimum EC2 cluster size and automatically replace unhealthy instances. The EC2 instances are behind an Application Load Balancer so that the load can be spread evenly on all instances. The application target group health check is configured with a fixed HTTP page that queries a dummy item on the database. The web application connects to a Multi-AZ Amazon RDS MySQL instance. A recent outage caused a major loss to the company’s revenue. Upon investigation, it was found that the web server metrics are within the normal range but the database CPU usage is very high, causing the EC2 health checks to timeout. Failing the health checks, the Auto Scaling group continuously replaced the unhealthy instances thus causing the downtime.

Which of the following options should the Solution Architect implement to prevent this from happening again and allow the application to handle more traffic in the future? (Select TWO.)

The answer about adding more read-replicas to the DB- is marked as incorrect.

The justification: This may be possible because creating read replicas is recommended to increase the read performance of an RDS cluster. However, this option does not resolve the original intention to reduce the number of repetitive queries hitting the database.

Now show me the intention not to send health.checks to the the DB in the question.

• Adding read-copies to DB is recommended by documentation
• Adding read-copies to DB – distributes the load, and so makes DB capable to read-load by health.check. So I believe the answer shouldnt be “incorrect”

And there are tons of such things. where to discuss those?

[Tutorials-Dojo]

Hi Fernando,

Thank you for message.

Let me answer this particular point that you mention here:

Many questions simply hyperfocus on a specific line of a document or blog, and use that to decide a correct answer. Often times that line is further clarified later in the AWS documentation, changing it’s meaning.

I took the first iteration of the official AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional exam (SAP-C00) last 2019, then the second one (SAP-C01) and its latest version (SAP-C02). This exam is quite difficult since its scenarios offer two or more related options that can meet the requirements, but only one is the MOST suitable in terms of operational overhead, cost, and other factors mentioned.

I’ve seen your posts in our forum, and we appreciate your raising valid concerns. One case is a missing/ambiguous term for “Amazon CloudWatch Alarms” where we only added the term “metric threshold”:

https://portal.tutorialsdojo.com/forums/discussion/eventbridge-does-not-listen-to-cloudwatch-metrics/#post-527968

Technically for the above, you do create a custom metric name as part of your CloudWatch Alarm creation process, as showcased in my response in the thread above. Nonetheless, we acknowledge this shortcoming and have refactored the scenario to avoid ambiguity.

However, you do have one thread here where BOTH the keywords in the scenario and the official AWS documentation match IN VERBATIM. You kept insisting of using a “throughput-intensive” solution over a “throughput-oriented” storage option, even though the rationale is backed up by three or more AWS documentation, including the AWS product pages.

Please see here:

Incorrect answer on EBS Cold HDD

We’ll continue answering the questions you posted here, and if there are issues on our side, we’re happy to fix them; but we won’t be swayed over to your opinion when the official AWS documentation clearly supports our provided answer.

Let us know if you need further assistance. The Tutorials Dojo team is dedicated to help you pass your AWS exam on your first try!

Regards,

Jon Bonso @ Tutorials Dojo