SOA-C02 Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation Practice Test 9 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A SysOps admin is troubleshooting an Auto Scaling group that fails to launch instances. The group uses a launch template with an Amazon Linux 2 AMI. The admin reviews the scaling activity history and sees: 'Launching a new EC2 instance. Status: Failed. Description: Your spot request price is lower than the minimum required Spot price.' Which change should the admin make to resolve the issue?

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

Accepted Answer

Increase the maximum price for the Spot request in the launch template. The error message indicates that the Spot Instance request failed because the maximum price specified in the launch template is below the current Spot market price. By increasing the maximum price in the launch template (Option A), you allow the Spot request to meet or exceed the minimum required Spot price, enabling the Auto Scaling group to successfully launch instances. This is the direct fix for the price-related failure.

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Modify the Auto Scaling group to use On-Demand instances instead of Spot

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Change the Auto Scaling group to a different AWS Region

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Increase the desired capacity of the Auto Scaling group

Question 2

A company wants to receive a real-time notification whenever an IAM user creates a new access key. Which combination of AWS services should be used to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

AWS CloudTrail and Amazon EventBridge. AWS CloudTrail captures IAM API calls, including CreateAccessKey, as management events. Amazon EventBridge can be configured with a rule that matches this specific API call pattern and triggers a real-time notification (e.g., via SNS or Lambda). This combination provides the exact event-driven monitoring required without polling or custom code.

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Amazon GuardDuty and Amazon SQS

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Amazon CloudWatch Logs and AWS Lambda

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AWS Config and Amazon SNS

Question 3

An application running on EC2 instances sends custom metrics to CloudWatch using the PutMetricData API. The SysOps admin notices that some metrics are missing from the CloudWatch console. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The namespace in the PutMetricData call does not match the namespace in the CloudWatch console. Custom metrics in CloudWatch are uniquely identified by the combination of namespace, metric name, and dimensions. If the namespace used in the PutMetricData API call does not match the namespace being viewed in the CloudWatch console, the metrics will not appear under that namespace. CloudWatch does not automatically merge or alias namespaces, so mismatched namespaces cause the data to be stored under a different namespace, making it invisible in the console view.

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The metric data does not include a unit

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The metric data does not include a dimension

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The metric data is being sent with a timestamp older than 14 days

Question 4

A SysOps admin is investigating why a CloudWatch alarm did not trigger an SNS notification when a metric breached the threshold. The alarm state is visible in the console as 'ALARM'. What is the most likely reason the notification was not sent?

Accepted Answer

The SNS topic's subscription is not confirmed. The most likely reason the notification was not sent is that the SNS topic's subscription is not confirmed. When an SNS topic sends a notification to an endpoint such as email, HTTP, or SMS, the subscription must first be confirmed by the subscriber. If the subscription remains in a 'Pending confirmation' state, SNS will not deliver messages to that endpoint, even if the CloudWatch alarm transitions to the ALARM state and publishes to the topic.

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The alarm name contains special characters

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The alarm's evaluation period is set to 1 minute

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The metric has a resolution of 1 minute

Question 5

A company needs to retain API call logs for 7 years for compliance. Which AWS service should be used to store these logs?

Accepted Answer

AWS CloudTrail. AWS CloudTrail is the correct service because it records API activity across your AWS infrastructure and can be configured to store logs in an S3 bucket with lifecycle policies that retain data for 7 years. CloudTrail is specifically designed for auditing and compliance, capturing management and data plane API calls, and supports long-term retention via S3 object locking or lifecycle rules.

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AWS Config

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Amazon CloudWatch Logs

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Amazon VPC Flow Logs

Question 6

A SysOps admin notices that an EC2 instance's status check fails intermittently. The instance is part of an Auto Scaling group. What is the most appropriate first step to diagnose the issue?

Accepted Answer

Review the instance's status check history in the EC2 console. The most appropriate first step is to review the instance's status check history in the EC2 console (Option D). This allows the SysOps admin to determine whether the failures are due to system status checks (e.g., underlying hardware issues) or instance status checks (e.g., OS-level problems). Since the instance is part of an Auto Scaling group, understanding the root cause is critical before taking any corrective action, as premature termination or reboot could mask the issue or lead to unnecessary replacements.

Answer

Stop and start the instance

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Terminate the instance and let Auto Scaling replace it

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Reboot the instance

Question 7

A company uses AWS CloudFormation to deploy infrastructure. A SysOps admin wants to receive a notification when a stack update fails. Which approach is the most efficient?

Accepted Answer

Create an EventBridge rule that matches CloudFormation stack events. Amazon EventBridge can directly capture CloudFormation stack events (e.g., CREATE_FAILED, UPDATE_FAILED) in real time and trigger a notification via SNS or Lambda. This approach is serverless, requires no polling, and is the most efficient method for reacting to stack update failures as they occur.

Answer

Write a script that polls the CloudFormation API and sends notifications

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Use AWS Config to monitor stack resources

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Enable CloudTrail and create a metric filter for stack update failures

Question 8

Which TWO actions should a SysOps admin take to troubleshoot an Amazon RDS instance that is experiencing high CPU utilization? (Choose 2.)

Accepted Answer

Enable Enhanced Monitoring to view OS-level metrics. Enhanced Monitoring provides OS-level metrics (e.g., CPU, memory, disk I/O) for the RDS instance, which helps identify resource contention at the operating system level. This granularity is essential for diagnosing high CPU utilization that may be caused by OS processes (e.g., backup, patching) rather than database queries alone.

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Enable Multi-AZ to distribute the load

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Delete the slow query log to free up CPU

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Increase the instance size to reduce CPU utilization

Question 9

A company is using CloudWatch Logs to centralize logs from multiple EC2 instances. The operations team notices that some log entries are missing from CloudWatch Logs. The CloudWatch agent is installed and running on all instances. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The IAM role attached to the EC2 instance does not have the 'logs:PutLogEvents' permission.. The most likely cause is that the IAM role attached to the EC2 instance lacks the 'logs:PutLogEvents' permission. Without this permission, the CloudWatch agent can authenticate and connect to CloudWatch Logs but cannot actually write log data to the log stream, resulting in missing entries. The agent may appear to be running and healthy, but API calls to PutLogEvents will fail silently or log errors, leading to gaps in the centralized logs.

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The CloudWatch agent is not configured to send logs to the correct log group.

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The CloudWatch agent is sending logs to a different AWS Region.

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The log group has been encrypted with a KMS key that the agent does not have access to.

Question 10

A SysOps administrator is setting up a CloudWatch dashboard to monitor an application. The application runs on an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The administrator wants to track the number of healthy hosts and the request count per target group. Which two metrics should be used? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

HealthyHostCount (per TargetGroup). `HealthyHostCount` (per TargetGroup) is a CloudWatch metric that reports the number of healthy EC2 instances in a specific target group, which directly indicates the health of the backend fleet. Option D is correct because `RequestCount` (per TargetGroup) tracks the number of requests routed to that target group, allowing the administrator to correlate traffic load with host health. Together, these two metrics provide the exact visibility needed for an Auto Scaling group behind an ALB.

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RequestCount (per ALB)

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ActiveConnectionCount

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HealthyHostCount (per ALB)

Question 11

Refer to the exhibit. The command returns no datapoints for CPUUtilization for the specified instance. What is the most likely reason?

Accepted Answer

The instance was stopped or did not emit metrics during the specified time range.. The most likely reason for no datapoints is that the instance was stopped or did not emit metrics during the specified time range. CloudWatch only retains and returns metric data when the instance is running and the CloudWatch agent or EC2 hypervisor is actively publishing CPUUtilization. If the instance was in a stopped state, no metrics are generated, resulting in an empty response from the GetMetricStatistics API call.

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The metric name is incorrect.

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The instance does not have detailed monitoring enabled.

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The period of 300 seconds is too short.

Question 12

A company wants to receive alerts when an Auto Scaling group launches or terminates instances. They already have a CloudTrail trail enabled. What is the simplest way to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

Create a CloudWatch Events rule that matches Auto Scaling event patterns and sends notifications to an SNS topic.. CloudWatch Events (now part of Amazon EventBridge) can automatically capture Auto Scaling group state changes (launch and terminate) via CloudTrail API calls. By creating a rule that matches the specific event pattern for Auto Scaling events (e.g., 'EC2 Instance Launch Successful' and 'EC2 Instance Terminate Successful'), you can directly route those events to an SNS topic, which then sends notifications (e.g., email or SMS). This requires no custom code, lifecycle hooks, or additional monitoring configuration, making it the simplest solution.

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Write a script on each EC2 instance to call the CloudWatch Logs API on launch/termination.

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Configure the Auto Scaling group to publish lifecycle hooks and use Lambda to send notifications.

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Enable CloudWatch detailed monitoring on the Auto Scaling group and create alarms.

Question 13

A SysOps administrator is troubleshooting an issue where an EC2 instance running a web server is becoming unresponsive under high load. The administrator has enabled detailed monitoring and set up CPUUtilization alarms. Which THREE additional steps could help diagnose the root cause? (Choose THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Install the CloudWatch agent and collect disk space metrics.. Under high load, the web server could become unresponsive due to disk space exhaustion (e.g., from log files filling the root partition). The CloudWatch agent can collect disk space metrics, which are not available by default, allowing the administrator to correlate disk usage with performance degradation.

Answer

Place the instance behind an Auto Scaling group.

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Increase the instance size to handle more load.

Question 14

Refer to the exhibit. An application running on EC2 is using the AWS SDK to publish custom metrics to CloudWatch. The application fails to publish metrics. The IAM role attached to the EC2 instance has this policy. What is the issue?

Accepted Answer

The application may be using a different namespace than 'MyApp'.. The IAM policy explicitly allows 'cloudwatch:PutMetricData' on the condition that the namespace is 'MyApp'. If the application's AWS SDK code publishes metrics under a different namespace (e.g., 'AWS/EC2' or a custom namespace like 'MyOtherApp'), the condition fails and the API call is denied. This is the most likely cause of the failure, as the policy is otherwise correctly configured for the specified namespace.

Answer

The condition key 'cloudwatch:namespace' is misspelled.

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The policy does not specify a specific resource ARN.

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The action 'cloudwatch:PutMetricData' is not allowed for custom metrics.

Question 15

A company has a production environment with multiple EC2 instances that send logs to CloudWatch Logs. The operations team wants to search across all log groups for a specific error pattern. What is the most efficient way to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

Use CloudWatch Logs Insights to query across all log groups.. CloudWatch Logs Insights allows you to run SQL-like queries across multiple log groups in a single query, making it the most efficient way to search for a specific error pattern across all log groups without needing to set up additional infrastructure or manually query each group individually.

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Set up a subscription filter to stream logs to an Amazon ES domain.

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Use CloudWatch Logs filter patterns on each log group.

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Download all logs to an S3 bucket and use Amazon Athena to query.