DOP-C02 Monitoring and Logging Practice Question
A company uses Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and wants to monitor database performance metrics such as CPU utilization, memory, and disk I/O. Which AWS service should be used to set up custom dashboards and alarms for these 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
✓
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch (Option D) is the correct service for monitoring Amazon RDS performance metrics such as CPU utilization, memory, and disk I/O. CloudWatch provides built-in metrics for RDS, allows creation of custom dashboards to visualize these metrics, and supports setting alarms for proactive notifications. Option A (AWS X-Ray) is used for tracing and analyzing requests through applications, not for infrastructure metrics. Option B (Amazon VPC Flow Logs) captures IP traffic information for network troubleshooting, not database performance. Option C (AWS CloudTrail) logs API calls for auditing, not performance monitoring. Therefore, CloudWatch is the appropriate choice for this use case.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
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AWS X-Ray
Why it's wrong here
AWS X-Ray is designed for distributed application tracing, capturing end-to-end request paths, segment timing, and errors across microservices. It does not collect infrastructure-level metrics from Amazon RDS such as CPU utilization, free storage, or connection counts. Even if you use the X-Ray SDK to annotate SQL queries, the service remains an application performance tracing tool, not a database monitoring service.
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Amazon VPC Flow Logs
Why it's wrong here
VPC Flow Logs capture metadata about IP traffic directed to and from network interfaces, including source/destination addresses, ports, protocols, and packet/byte counts. They can reveal whether a client can reach the RDS endpoint at the network layer, but they expose no database-internal metrics like query latency, transaction throughput, or disk I/O health. Thus they are useful for connectivity troubleshooting, not as a primary RDS monitoring solution.
- ✗
AWS CloudTrail
Why it's wrong here
AWS CloudTrail records API calls made on your AWS account, providing audit evidence of actions such as creating, modifying, or deleting an RDS instance. It captures the identity of the caller, time, and request parameters, but it does not report performance metrics like memory pressure, database connections, or replica lag. CloudTrail is essential for security and governance, yet it cannot serve as a tool for monitoring the operational health of a PostgreSQL database.
- ✓
Amazon CloudWatch
Why this is correct
Amazon CloudWatch natively ingests Amazon RDS performance metrics—including CPU utilization, freeable memory, database connections, read/write IOPS, and replica lag—through the AWS/RDS metric namespace. These metrics are published automatically and can be visualized in CloudWatch dashboards or used to trigger alarms for proactive alerting and auto scaling actions. CloudWatch also supports publishing custom metrics and streaming RDS logs, making it the comprehensive monitoring service for RDS PostgreSQL.
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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.