Monitoring, Troubleshooting, and Incident Response
Troubleshooting questions reward a layered diagnostic approach. Know the tools: Acquia Cloud logs (web/Apache, PHP/error, Drupal watchdog, Varnish, database slow query), Insight (performance and availability monitoring), and status/health indicators. Start at the layer where the symptom appears: 5xx from the load balancer vs PHP fatal vs Drupal exception vs Varnish 503 (backend unhealthy).
A classic trap is jumping to a code fix before checking infrastructure: a site down for everyone is often a database or server issue, not a module bug. A site slow for anonymous users points to Varnish/CDN; slow for logged-in users points to Drupal caches or the database. Check recent deploys, config imports, and database copies-most incidents correlate with a recent change.
Incident response on Acquia Cloud: identify scope (all users vs some), check status and logs, consider rolling back the deploy or restoring a backup, and communicate. Know that database backups exist and can be restored, and that you can create an on-demand environment from a backup to investigate safely without touching Prod. That is a favorite exam answer: investigate in a copy, not in Prod.
Worked example: after a deploy, Prod returns 500s. Check PHP error logs first; if the error is a missing config or DB update, run drush updb/cim or roll back to the prior tag. If the cause is unclear, restore the backup into a new on-demand environment and reproduce there.
Watch for questions distinguishing Acquia-side outages (check status page, open a ticket) from application bugs, and on when to purge Varnish vs restart services.