DOP-C02 Monitoring and Logging Practice Test 16 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company uses Amazon CloudWatch to monitor its production environment. The DevOps team wants to receive an email notification whenever the average CPU utilization of any EC2 instance exceeds 90% for 5 consecutive minutes. Which steps should be taken to set up this notification?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

Create a CloudWatch alarm on CPUUtilization with a threshold of 90% for 5 consecutive periods, and configure an SNS topic to send email. Create a CloudWatch alarm on the CPUUtilization metric with a threshold of 90% for 5 consecutive periods (5 minutes assuming 1-minute periods), and configure an SNS topic to send email notifications. Option A is incorrect because the CloudWatch Logs agent collects log data, not metrics, and metric filters are for log analysis, not setting alarms on CPU utilization. Option C is incorrect because AWS CloudTrail logs API calls, not CPU utilization metrics. Option D is incorrect because AWS Config is for resource configuration auditing and compliance, not for monitoring CPU utilization metrics.

Answer

Install the CloudWatch Logs agent on each EC2 instance and configure a metric filter to trigger an SNS notification

Answer

Use AWS CloudTrail to monitor CPU utilization and send notifications via SNS

Answer

Use AWS Config to create a rule that triggers an SNS notification when CPU utilization exceeds 90%

Question 2

A company runs a critical application on an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The DevOps team needs to implement a dashboard that shows real-time request latency, error rates, and the number of healthy hosts. Which AWS service should be used to create this dashboard?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards. Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards is the correct choice because it provides real-time monitoring and visualization of metrics such as request latency, error rates, and healthy host counts directly from CloudWatch. These metrics are automatically emitted by the Application Load Balancer (e.g., TargetResponseTime, HTTPCode_ELB_5XX_Count, HealthyHostCount) and can be displayed on a customizable dashboard without additional data transformation or querying.

Answer

Amazon QuickSight

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Answer

AWS Config

Question 3

A DevOps engineer is troubleshooting a slow web application. The application runs on EC2 instances behind an ALB. The engineer notices that the ALB's TargetResponseTime metric shows high p99 values, but the CPU and memory on the EC2 instances are well below thresholds. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The application is waiting on a slow database query or external API call. High p99 TargetResponseTime on the ALB with low CPU and memory on the EC2 instances indicates that the bottleneck is not compute capacity but rather a dependency external to the application server. The application is likely waiting on a slow database query or external API call, which increases response time without consuming significant local CPU or memory. This is a classic symptom of an I/O-bound or network-bound dependency.

Answer

The Auto Scaling group has too many instances, causing increased network overhead

Answer

The ALB is routing requests to instances in different Availability Zones, increasing latency

Answer

The ALB idle timeout is set too low, causing connections to be dropped

Question 4

A company wants to monitor the number of messages that are published to an Amazon SNS topic. Which CloudWatch metric should be used?

Accepted Answer

NumberOfMessagesPublished. The CloudWatch metric 'NumberOfMessagesPublished' tracks the number of messages published to an SNS topic. Option A (SMSMonthToDateSpentUSD) tracks monthly SMS spend, not messages published. Option B (PublishSize) is not a standard SNS metric; the relevant metric is 'PublishSize' for message size, but it's not for counting messages. Option C (NumberOfNotificationsDelivered) counts messages delivered to subscribers, not published.

Answer

SMSMonthToDateSpentUSD

Answer

PublishSize

Answer

NumberOfNotificationsDelivered

Question 5

A company has a microservices architecture with 50 services running on Amazon ECS. The DevOps team wants to collect and analyze logs from all services centrally. They need to query logs across services and set up alerts for error patterns. Which solution is the most scalable and cost-effective?

Accepted Answer

Use the awslogs driver to send logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs and use CloudWatch Logs Insights for querying and metric filters for alerts. Using the awslogs driver to ship ECS container logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs is the most scalable and cost-effective native solution. CloudWatch Logs Insights provides a query language for searching across log groups, and metric filters can trigger CloudWatch alarms on error patterns. This requires no cluster management, scales automatically with log volume, and integrates natively with ECS task definitions via the logConfiguration block.

Answer

Use AWS CloudTrail to capture all log events and store them in an S3 bucket for analysis

Answer

Deploy an Amazon Elasticsearch cluster and configure the ECS Fargate agent to send logs directly to Elasticsearch

Answer

Send logs to Amazon S3 and use Amazon Athena for querying, with scheduled queries for alerts

Question 6

A DevOps engineer receives an alarm that an EC2 instance's StatusCheckFailed metric has been in ALARM state for 10 minutes. Which action should the engineer take first to investigate?

Accepted Answer

Review the instance's system log and application logs in CloudWatch Logs. When StatusCheckFailed is in ALARM, the first investigative step is to examine the instance's system log and application logs in CloudWatch Logs, because these reveal whether the failure is an OS-level crash, kernel panic, or application error causing the instance to fail its status checks. Reviewing logs is non-destructive and provides the diagnostic evidence needed before taking any remediation action.

Answer

Use AWS Config to check the instance's configuration compliance

Answer

Check AWS CloudTrail for any API calls that modified the instance

Answer

Restart the EC2 instance to clear the alarm

Question 7

A company wants to receive a notification when an AWS IAM user creates a new access key. Which AWS service should be used to capture this event and trigger a notification?

Accepted Answer

AWS CloudTrail with CloudWatch Events. AWS CloudTrail captures API activity, including the CreateAccessKey event when an IAM user creates a new access key. By sending these events to Amazon CloudWatch Events (now part of Amazon EventBridge), you can define a rule that triggers a notification via SNS, Lambda, or other targets. This combination provides the real-time event-driven notification the company requires.

Answer

Amazon GuardDuty

Answer

Amazon CloudWatch

Answer

AWS Config

Question 8

A DevOps team is setting up centralized logging for a multi-account AWS environment. They want to aggregate logs from all accounts into a single S3 bucket. Which services should be used to achieve this? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

AWS CloudTrail. AWS CloudTrail is correct because it can be configured to deliver log files from multiple accounts to a single S3 bucket by setting up a trail in the management account and using the 'Enable for all accounts in my organization' option, which automatically applies the trail to all member accounts in AWS Organizations. This centralizes CloudTrail logs without requiring per-account configuration.

Answer

AWS Config

Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

Answer

Amazon S3 replication

Question 9

A company uses Amazon RDS for MySQL and wants to monitor slow queries to optimize performance. Which actions should the DevOps engineer take to capture and analyze slow query logs? (Choose THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Enable the slow query log parameter in the RDS DB parameter group. To capture and analyze slow query logs in Amazon RDS for MySQL, the DevOps engineer should enable the slow query log parameter in the DB parameter group (B), configure RDS to publish logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs (D), and use CloudWatch Logs Insights to query and analyze the logs (E). Option A (CloudTrail) captures API activity, not SQL queries. Option C (Performance Insights) monitors database performance metrics but does not capture slow query logs.

Answer

Use AWS CloudTrail to capture SQL queries

Answer

Enable RDS Performance Insights

Question 10

A company is using AWS CloudFormation to deploy infrastructure. The DevOps team wants to receive notifications when a stack creation fails. Which services can be used together to send an email notification on stack failure? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). Amazon SNS (Option C) is correct because it can send email notifications to subscribers when a CloudFormation stack creation fails. AWS CloudFormation (Option D) is correct because it can directly publish failure events to an SNS topic via the 'NotificationARNs' parameter in stack creation, enabling automated email alerts without additional services.

Answer

AWS Lambda

Answer

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

Answer

Amazon CloudWatch

Question 11

A company uses AWS Lambda functions behind an Amazon API Gateway REST API. The DevOps team wants to monitor the end-to-end latency of API requests, including the time spent in API Gateway and Lambda. Which approach provides the most granular breakdown?

Accepted Answer

Enable AWS X-Ray tracing on API Gateway and Lambda.. AWS X-Ray provides end-to-end tracing with detailed segments for API Gateway and Lambda, allowing per-request breakdown of latency across each component. Option A (Lambda Insights) offers OS-level metrics like CPU and memory, not request-level latency breakdown. Option C (VPC Flow Logs) captures network traffic metadata but not application layer latency. Option D (combining CloudWatch metrics) only gives aggregate statistics and cannot break down latency per request or within a single request's path.

Answer

Enable Lambda Insights to get per-request latency breakdown.

Answer

Enable VPC Flow Logs to capture network round-trip times.

Answer

Use CloudWatch metrics for API Gateway and Lambda, then add them together.

Question 12

A company has a production Amazon EKS cluster with multiple node groups. The DevOps team notices that some pods are frequently restarting due to OOMKilled errors, but the cluster-level metrics (CPU, memory) appear normal. Which CloudWatch Container Insights metric should be analyzed to identify the specific node or pod causing the issue?

Accepted Answer

pod_memory_utilization.. OOMKilled errors are caused by individual containers exceeding their memory limits, which is a pod-level (container-level) condition. CloudWatch Container Insights exposes 'pod_memory_utilization' (and 'container_memory_utilization') per pod, allowing you to pinpoint which pod is hitting its memory limit even when node-level memory looks normal. This is the metric that directly correlates with OOMKilled restarts.

Answer

node_memory_utilization.

Answer

number_of_running_pods.

Answer

pod_cpu_utilization.

Question 13

A DevOps engineer needs to centrally collect and analyze logs from multiple AWS accounts and on-premises servers. Which AWS service should be used to aggregate logs in a single dashboard?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Logs.. Amazon CloudWatch Logs is the correct service for centrally collecting, storing, and analyzing logs from multiple AWS accounts and on-premises servers, with the ability to visualize them in a single dashboard via CloudWatch Logs Insights and CloudWatch dashboards. It supports cross-account log aggregation through subscription filters and centralized log groups.

Answer

Amazon Athena.

Answer

Amazon S3.

Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose.

Question 14

A company uses AWS CloudFormation to deploy infrastructure. The DevOps team wants to receive notifications when a stack creation fails due to a resource limit exceeded error. Which approach should be used?

Accepted Answer

Configure an SNS topic as a notification option in the CloudFormation stack, and subscribe an email endpoint.. CloudFormation natively supports sending stack events (including creation failures) to an SNS topic. By configuring an SNS topic as a notification option in the stack creation request, the DevOps team can subscribe an email endpoint to receive real-time notifications when a resource limit exceeded error occurs, without needing additional services or custom logic.

Answer

Create an Amazon EventBridge rule that matches CloudFormation resource limit exceeded events and sends to SQS.

Answer

Use AWS Config to detect when a stack is in a failed state.

Answer

Enable CloudTrail and create a CloudWatch alarm on the CreateStack API call.

Question 15

A DevOps team is troubleshooting a performance issue where an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance's CPU utilization spikes every hour. The team suspects a specific query from an application. Which combination of tools can identify the problematic query?

Accepted Answer

Amazon RDS Performance Insights and Enhanced Monitoring.. Amazon RDS Performance Insights is purpose-built to visualize database load (DBLoad) broken down by SQL statement, wait event, and user, so it can pinpoint the exact query causing hourly CPU spikes. Enhanced Monitoring provides OS-level metrics (per-process CPU, memory, disk I/O) at up to 1-second granularity, letting the team correlate the spike with the specific PostgreSQL backend process. Together they identify both the offending SQL and the resource it consumes.

Answer

CloudWatch Logs Insights and CloudWatch metrics.

Answer

VPC Flow Logs and Lambda.

Answer

CloudTrail and CloudWatch alarms.