DOP-C02 Monitoring and Logging Practice Question
A company needs to monitor the CPU utilization of its Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance. The metric should be available in Amazon CloudWatch with a granularity of 1 minute. Which action should the team take?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Enhanced Monitoring (which provides OS-level metrics at higher granularity) with basic CloudWatch monitoring, leading them to incorrectly select Option B when the question only requires standard 1-minute CPU utilization metrics.
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
✓
No additional configuration is needed; RDS automatically sends metrics to CloudWatch.
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL automatically publishes metrics, including CPU utilization, to CloudWatch with a default granularity of 1 minute for standard instances. No additional configuration is required to enable this basic monitoring. The metrics are collected by the RDS hypervisor layer and sent to CloudWatch without needing an agent or extra setup.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Install the CloudWatch agent on the RDS instance.
Why it's wrong here
Amazon RDS is a fully managed database service, and you do not have access to the underlying host or operating system to install the CloudWatch agent. The CloudWatch agent is intended for EC2 instances, on-premises servers, or other resources where you can install software to collect custom metrics and logs. RDS natively publishes CPU utilization and other database metrics to CloudWatch through its built-in service integration, so an agent is neither possible nor needed.
- ✗
Enable Enhanced Monitoring for the RDS instance.
Why it's wrong here
Enhanced Monitoring is an optional RDS feature that provides OS-level metrics such as individual process CPU usage, memory, and disk I/O at one-second granularity. It runs a lightweight agent within the RDS instance and publishes its own set of metrics to CloudWatch, but it is not required for the default CPU utilization metric. RDS already reports CPUUtilization in the AWS/RDS namespace automatically, so enabling Enhanced Monitoring would only add deeper visibility for troubleshooting.
- ✓
No additional configuration is needed; RDS automatically sends metrics to CloudWatch.
Why this is correct
RDS automatically emits the CPUUtilization metric to CloudWatch in the AWS/RDS namespace for every database instance, with no setup or configuration required. This metric is collected from the hypervisor at the instance level and is available in the CloudWatch console, enabling alarms and dashboards immediately after the database is provisioned. Basic monitoring is included as part of the service, and you can optionally use detailed monitoring or Enhanced Monitoring for faster granularity.
- ✗
Enable Performance Insights for the RDS instance.
Why it's wrong here
Performance Insights is a database performance monitoring tool that tracks database load, wait states, and the SQL queries causing that load. Its primary metric, DBLoad, measures the average number of active sessions and is aimed at troubleshooting query performance, not at monitoring host CPU usage. RDS' built-in CloudWatch CPUUtilization metric already covers CPU monitoring, so enabling Performance Insights would be an unnecessary and unrelated action for this requirement.
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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.