DOP-C02 Monitoring and Logging Practice Question
A company is using Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics to monitor the availability of a web application. The canary runs every 5 minutes from multiple locations. Recently, the canary has been failing intermittently with HTTP 503 errors, but the application team reports that the application is healthy. Which step should the DevOps engineer take to identify the cause of the false positives?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Review the canary's CloudWatch Logs to check for network errors or timeouts.
Checking the canary's CloudWatch Logs might reveal that the failure is due to a network timeout or other client-side issue, not the application. Option A is wrong because increasing canary frequency would generate more data but not identify the cause. Option B is wrong because increasing timeout might mask the issue. Option D is wrong because adding more locations would not pinpoint the cause if the issue is client-side.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the canary timeout setting to allow more time for the application to respond.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing the canary timeout setting only extends the maximum time the canary waits for a response, so it does not help diagnose why the application failed to respond within the original threshold. This change can actually mask a genuine performance regression by allowing slow responses to pass as successful, preventing the failure from being surfaced for investigation. The correct approach is to use the canary's logs and metrics to determine whether the latency stems from network issues, resource saturation, or an application bug.
- ✗
Add more canary locations to increase coverage.
Why it's wrong here
Adding more canary locations expands geographic coverage, but it will not isolate the root cause when the canary is already failing from a specific location. If the issue is triggered by client-side dependencies or regional network conditions, other locations may succeed and provide irrelevant data, while the failing location still lacks diagnostic detail. The primary need is to inspect the existing canary's execution traces and logs, not to increase the number of test vantage points.
- ✓
Review the canary's CloudWatch Logs to check for network errors or timeouts.
Why this is correct
The CloudWatch Synthetics canary's logs contain detailed request/response records, error stack traces, and screenshots captured during the run, making them essential for pinpointing whether a failure is caused by network errors, timeouts, or the application itself. By reviewing these logs, you can check for DNS resolution failures, TCP handshake timeouts, TLS certificate errors, or 4xx/5xx responses that indicate the problem is not with the client-side script. This is the first diagnostic step because it separates infrastructure-level issues from application-level defects.
- ✗
Increase the canary run frequency to every 1 minute.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing the canary run frequency to every minute simply produces more identical failure data without adding any new diagnostic information about the root cause. It also multiplies the cost of Lambda invocations and can cause unnecessary load on the monitored application, potentially masking issues like rate limiting or performance degradation that only appear under repeated load. Frequency changes are for alerting granularity, not for debugging an existing failure.
Visual reference
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
One of 1,487 original DOP-C02 practice questions on Courseiva, each with a full explanation and wrong-answer analysis — not exam dumps or protected exam content. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DOP-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the DOP-C02 exam.