DOP-C02 Monitoring and Logging Practice Question
A company runs a microservices application on Amazon EKS. The DevOps team wants to collect and visualize metrics such as pod CPU and memory usage, and set up alerts. Which combination of AWS services should be used?
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
✓
Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights and CloudWatch Alarms
Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights and CloudWatch Alarms. Container Insights collects, aggregates, and summarizes metrics and logs from containerized applications and microservices running on Amazon EKS. It provides pre-built dashboards for pod CPU, memory, network, and disk metrics. CloudWatch Alarms can be set on these metrics to trigger notifications or automated actions. Option A (Prometheus and Grafana on EC2) is possible but not an AWS service combination; it requires manual setup and maintenance. Option B (AWS X-Ray and Amazon CloudWatch ServiceLens) is for distributed tracing and service maps, not for collecting CPU/memory metrics. Option C (AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch Logs) is for auditing API calls and storing log data, not for metrics visualization and alerting.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Prometheus and Grafana on EC2
Why it's wrong here
While self-managed Prometheus and Grafana can monitor EKS metrics, running them on EC2 means you are responsible for provisioning, scaling, patching, and operating the monitoring stack itself. This approach lacks the native integration, automatic discovery, and managed operational model of AWS services, so it is not the optimal fully managed solution for collecting and visualizing pod-level resource utilization.
- ✗
AWS X-Ray and Amazon CloudWatch ServiceLens
Why it's wrong here
AWS X-Ray provides distributed tracing for request-level analysis, not pod-level resource metrics like CPU or memory usage, so it cannot satisfy the requirement to collect and visualise those specific metrics. It is tempting because CloudWatch ServiceLens integrates X-Ray traces with CloudWatch metrics for debugging application performance, which would be correct if the stem asked for end-to-end request tracing and correlated metric alerts rather than pod resource monitoring.
- ✗
AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch Logs
Why it's wrong here
AWS CloudTrail records API call history for audit, compliance, and governance purposes; it does not capture telemetry such as CPU, memory, or network utilization of Kubernetes pods. Amazon CloudWatch Logs only ingests and queries log data, not performance metrics, so this combination cannot satisfy the requirement to collect and visualize pod-level resource metrics or trigger metric-based alerts.
- ✓
Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights and CloudWatch Alarms
Why this is correct
Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights automatically discovers and collects pod-level metrics from Amazon EKS, including CPU, memory, network, and disk utilization, and presents them through pre-built dashboards. By defining CloudWatch Alarms on these metrics, operators receive proactive notifications when thresholds are breached, making this a fully managed, integrated solution for monitoring and alerting on container resource usage.
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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.