DOP-C02 Monitoring and Logging Practice Test 5 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company's DevOps team notices that their Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance's CPU utilization spikes to 90% every day at 10:00 AM, causing application latency. They want to be notified when the CPU utilization exceeds 80% for more than 5 minutes to investigate the cause. Which solution should they implement?

Accepted Answer

Create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm on the CPUUtilization metric with a period of 5 minutes and a threshold of 80, and set the alarm action to send a notification to an Amazon SNS topic.. Option D is correct because a CloudWatch alarm with a metric math expression can trigger an SNS notification when CPUUtilization exceeds 80% for 5 minutes. Option A is wrong because CloudTrail does not monitor CPU utilization. Option B is wrong because Trusted Advisor does not create custom alarms. Option C is wrong because CloudWatch Logs Insights is for log analysis, not metric alarms.

Answer

Use Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights to query the RDS logs and trigger an SNS notification when CPU utilization is high.

Answer

Enable AWS Trusted Advisor to automatically create a CloudWatch alarm on the CPU utilization metric.

Answer

Create an AWS CloudTrail trail to monitor CPU utilization and trigger an AWS Lambda function to send an email notification.

Question 2

A company is using Amazon CloudWatch Logs to collect logs from its containerized applications running on Amazon ECS Fargate. The DevOps engineer wants to centralize logs from multiple services into a single CloudWatch Logs log group. They currently have a log group per service. Which approach minimizes operational overhead and cost?

Accepted Answer

Create a CloudWatch Logs subscription filter on each service log group to stream matching log events to a central log group.. Option B is correct because CloudWatch Logs subscription filters allow you to stream log events from multiple source log groups directly into a single destination log group in real time, without any intermediate storage or additional services. This minimizes operational overhead by using a native CloudWatch feature and avoids the cost of running Kinesis, S3, or Athena for this specific use case.

Answer

Use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to stream logs from each log group to Amazon S3 and then to a central CloudWatch Logs group.

Answer

Export each log group to Amazon S3 and use Amazon Athena to query across all exported logs.

Answer

Modify the application logging configuration in each container to send logs to a single log group and log stream per container.

Question 3

A DevOps engineer needs to monitor the number of 4xx and 5xx HTTP errors returned by an Application Load Balancer (ALB). They want to set up a dashboard that shows the error count over the last 24 hours. Which CloudWatch metrics should they use?

Accepted Answer

Use the 'HTTPCode_Target_4XX_Count' and 'HTTPCode_Target_5XX_Count' metrics.. Option B is correct because the ALB emits the 'HTTPCode_Target_4XX_Count' and 'HTTPCode_Target_5XX_Count' metrics. Option A is wrong because those are load balancer-level metrics, not target-level. Option C is wrong because those metrics do not exist. Option D is wrong because 'ErrorCount' is not a standard ALB metric.

Answer

Use the 'RequestCount' metric with a statistic of 'ErrorCount'.

Answer

Use the 'HTTPCode_ELB_4XX_Count' and 'HTTPCode_ELB_5XX_Count' metrics.

Answer

Use the 'TargetResponseTime' metric and count the number of responses above 4 seconds.

Question 4

A company uses AWS Lambda functions to process incoming events. The DevOps team notices that some functions are timing out after 30 seconds, but the configured timeout is 1 minute. They want to capture the actual invocation duration for all invocations to analyze performance. What is the most efficient way to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

Enable detailed CloudWatch Logs for the Lambda functions and parse the 'REPORT' log entries to extract the 'Duration' value.. Option C is correct because Lambda automatically writes a REPORT log entry to CloudWatch Logs at the end of each invocation, which includes the exact 'Duration' in milliseconds. Parsing these logs is the most efficient approach since it requires no code changes, no additional infrastructure, and leverages existing logging with no extra cost beyond standard CloudWatch Logs ingestion.

Answer

Add custom metrics using the AWS SDK within the Lambda function code to record the duration.

Answer

Configure Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to receive Lambda invocation records and compute duration using a consumer application.

Answer

Use AWS CloudTrail to capture Lambda execution events and analyze the 'duration' field.

Question 5

A company is running a production microservices architecture on Amazon ECS with Fargate. The operations team wants to set up centralized logging across all services, including the ability to search logs in near real-time and retain them for 3 years. The logs are currently sent to CloudWatch Logs. Which combination of services would meet these requirements with the least operational overhead?

Accepted Answer

Set a retention policy of 3 years on the CloudWatch Logs log groups and use CloudWatch Logs Insights for searching.. Option C is correct because CloudWatch Logs provides near real-time search and can set retention to 3 years. Option A is wrong because S3 + Athena is not real-time and adds complexity. Option B is wrong because Elasticsearch Service adds operational overhead. Option D is wrong because Firehose to S3 alone lacks search capability.

Answer

Stream logs to Amazon OpenSearch Service (Elasticsearch) using a CloudWatch Logs subscription filter.

Answer

Export logs to Amazon S3 and use Amazon Athena to query them.

Answer

Use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to deliver logs to Amazon S3 with a 3-year lifecycle policy.

Question 6

A DevOps engineer is troubleshooting a slow API response. They suspect that the issue is related to database queries. The application runs on EC2 instances behind an ALB and uses Amazon RDS for MySQL. Which monitoring approach will provide the most granular insight into database query performance?

Accepted Answer

Enable Enhanced Monitoring and Performance Insights for the RDS instance.. Option D is correct because Enhanced Monitoring provides OS-level metrics, and Performance Insights offers query-level performance data. Option A is wrong because ELB metrics only show overall latency. Option B is wrong because CloudWatch agent captures OS metrics but not query-specific data. Option C is wrong because CloudWatch Logs requires logs to be sent manually.

Answer

Enable CloudWatch Logs for the RDS instance and query the error log.

Answer

Install the CloudWatch agent on the EC2 instances to collect database performance counters.

Answer

Monitor the ALB's 'TargetResponseTime' metric and correlate with RDS 'CPUUtilization'.

Question 7

A company is using AWS CloudFormation to deploy infrastructure. They want to receive notifications when a stack operation fails, including the specific resource that caused the failure. Which approach should they use?

Accepted Answer

Configure an SNS topic as a notification option in the CloudFormation stack and subscribe to receive stack events.. Option B is correct because CloudFormation allows you to specify an SNS topic ARN as a notification option when creating or updating a stack. When a stack operation fails, CloudFormation publishes a notification to that SNS topic, and the notification includes the logical resource ID and the status reason for the failure. This provides real-time, event-driven notifications without requiring polling or additional services.

Answer

Create a CloudWatch alarm on the 'StackFailure' metric.

Answer

Create an AWS Lambda function that polls the CloudFormation DescribeStackEvents API every minute and sends an email on failure.

Answer

Enable AWS CloudTrail to log CloudFormation API calls and configure an SNS notification on the trail.

Question 8

A company is migrating its on-premises applications to AWS and wants to maintain the same level of monitoring for its Linux-based EC2 instances. They currently use Nagios for monitoring. They want a managed AWS service that can monitor instance health, system metrics, and application logs. Which solution should they use?

Accepted Answer

Install the Amazon CloudWatch agent on each EC2 instance to collect system metrics and logs, and send them to CloudWatch.. Option B is correct because CloudWatch unified agent collects system metrics and logs, and integrates with CloudWatch. Option A is wrong because Systems Manager Inventory is for software inventory, not real-time monitoring. Option C is wrong because CloudTrail is for API logging. Option D is wrong because Config is for configuration compliance.

Answer

Use AWS CloudTrail to monitor instance activity and capture log files.

Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager Inventory to collect system configuration and log files.

Answer

Use AWS Config to track instance configuration changes and trigger alerts.

Question 9

A DevOps team is deploying a new web application on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. They want to monitor the application's health and receive notifications when the environment's health status changes to 'Degraded' or 'Severe'. What is the simplest way to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

Create a CloudWatch alarm on the 'EnvironmentHealth' metric published by the Elastic Beanstalk environment.. Option A is correct because Elastic Beanstalk automatically publishes environment health metrics to CloudWatch, and you can create an alarm. Option B is wrong because CloudTrail does not monitor health. Option C is wrong because relying on Elastic Beanstalk console is not automated. Option D is wrong because custom metrics add unnecessary complexity.

Answer

Use the Elastic Beanstalk management console to manually check the health status twice a day.

Answer

Write a custom script that polls the Elastic Beanstalk DescribeEnvironmentHealth API and sends an email using Amazon SES.

Answer

Configure an AWS CloudTrail trail to monitor Elastic Beanstalk API calls and create a CloudWatch alarm on the trail.

Question 10

A company wants to set up centralized logging for its multi-account AWS environment. The logs include CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, and Amazon Route 53 resolver query logs. Which TWO services should they use to achieve this with minimal operational overhead? (Select TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Logs. Option A (CloudWatch Logs) and Option C (S3) are correct because CloudWatch Logs can receive logs from multiple accounts via subscription filters, and S3 can serve as a central archive. Option B is wrong because Kinesis is not needed as an intermediate. Option D is wrong because OpenSearch adds overhead. Option E is wrong because CloudTrail alone cannot centralize all log types.

Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

Answer

Amazon OpenSearch Service

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Question 11

A company is using Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics canaries to monitor its web application endpoints. The canaries are failing intermittently with timeout errors. The DevOps team needs to troubleshoot the root cause. Which THREE actions should they take? (Select THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Increase the canary timeout configuration to allow more time for the endpoint to respond.. Options B, C, and D are correct. B: Checking VPC Flow Logs helps identify network issues. C: Checking canary logs provides details about the failure. D: Increasing canary timeout may resolve if the timeout is too low. A is wrong because canaries run in Lambda and do not use EC2. E is wrong because CloudTrail does not capture canary execution details.

Answer

Use AWS CloudTrail to review Canary API calls.

Answer

Check the EC2 instance CPU utilization in the VPC where the canaries run.

Question 12

A DevOps engineer is setting up monitoring for an Amazon DynamoDB table that experiences high read traffic. They want to monitor the read capacity consumption and be alerted when the consumed read capacity exceeds 80% of the provisioned capacity for 5 consecutive minutes. Which TWO steps should they take? (Select TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Use CloudWatch to monitor the ConsumedReadCapacityUnits and ProvisionedReadCapacityUnits metrics.. Option C is correct because CloudWatch directly exposes the ConsumedReadCapacityUnits and ProvisionedReadCapacityUnits metrics for DynamoDB, which are the exact metrics needed to calculate read capacity utilization. Monitoring these metrics allows the engineer to track how much of the provisioned capacity is being consumed over time, which is the foundation for setting up the desired alert.

Answer

Enable AWS CloudTrail to log DynamoDB read requests.

Answer

Set up an AWS Lambda function to monitor the DynamoDB ReadThrottleEvents metric.

Answer

Configure DynamoDB to stream all read events to CloudWatch Logs.

Question 13

A company uses Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. The operations team notices that some instances are failing health checks but are not being terminated by Auto Scaling. What should be investigated to resolve this issue?

Accepted Answer

Check the health check grace period setting in the Auto Scaling group. If it is too long, instances failing health checks may not be terminated quickly.. Option C is correct because if the health check grace period is too long, instances that fail shortly after launch may not be terminated promptly. Option A is wrong because security groups allow traffic but do not affect health check initiation. Option B is wrong because ELB health checks are sent to the instances, not the other way. Option D is wrong because the load balancer is the one performing health checks.

Answer

Confirm that the load balancer's health check target is pointing to the correct port and path on the instances.

Answer

Ensure the instances are sending health check requests to the load balancer.

Answer

Verify that the security group for the instances allows inbound traffic from the load balancer on the health check port.

Question 14

A DevOps engineer is configuring a centralized logging solution using Amazon CloudWatch Logs. They need to ensure that logs from multiple AWS accounts are aggregated into a single CloudWatch Logs account. Which approach meets this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Create a subscription filter in each account that delivers log events to a CloudWatch Logs destination in the central account.. Option B is correct because CloudWatch Logs supports cross-account subscription filters that can deliver log events to a CloudWatch Logs destination in a central account. The destination is a logical resource that points to a Kinesis Data Stream or Lambda function in the central account, and the source account creates a subscription filter that sends matching log events to that destination. This allows centralized aggregation without requiring each account to manage separate streaming infrastructure.

Answer

Use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose in each account to stream logs to a central Amazon S3 bucket, then use Amazon Athena to query.

Answer

Set up a cross-account destination using an Amazon Kinesis Data Streams stream in the central account and configure each account to send logs to that stream.

Answer

Configure each application to use the PutLogEvents API to send logs directly to the central account's log group.

Question 15

A company is using AWS CloudTrail to track API calls. They want to be notified immediately when an IAM user creates a new access key. Which combination of AWS services should be used?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Events (Amazon EventBridge) with an Amazon SNS topic.. Option A is correct: CloudTrail logs the event, CloudWatch Events (now Amazon EventBridge) can filter for that event, and SNS can send the notification. Option B is wrong because Lambda is not needed to filter; EventBridge can do it. Option C is wrong because CloudWatch Logs is not the native way to trigger on specific events; EventBridge is better. Option D is wrong because Config is not for real-time event notification.

Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Logs with a metric filter and alarm.

Answer

AWS Config with an AWS Lambda function.

Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Events (Amazon EventBridge) with an AWS Lambda function that sends an email via Amazon SES.