DOP-C02 Incident and Event Response Practice Question
A company uses AWS CloudFormation to manage infrastructure. After a failed stack update, the stack is in ROLLBACK_COMPLETE state. The DevOps team needs to identify the specific resource that caused the rollback and review the error message. Which approach provides the most efficient way to achieve this?
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
✓
View the Events tab in the AWS CloudFormation console.
The CloudFormation console Events tab lists all stack events in chronological order, including the specific resource that caused the rollback and the associated error message. This is the most efficient way to quickly identify the resource and error without using CLI commands or parsing logs. Option A is incorrect: while describe-stack-events can retrieve the same information, the console is more efficient for a visual review. Option C is incorrect: CloudTrail logs the UpdateStack API call but does not provide a direct aggregated view of resource-specific errors. Option D is incorrect: describe-stack-resources only lists resources, not events or error details.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Run describe-stack-events and filter by status.
Why it's wrong here
Running `describe-stack-events` retrieves the raw list of stack events, so you could indeed filter them by `RESOURCE_SIGNAL` or failure statuses, but it requires you to construct JMESPath queries and manually correlate the failed resource's logical ID with its associated status reason. This process is far less efficient than the CloudFormation console's Events tab, which already aggregates events chronologically and visually surfaces the exact resource that failed and the error message that triggered the rollback. For a quick root-cause look, sifting through the full event stream with a CLI filter is unnecessarily cumbersome.
- ✓
View the Events tab in the AWS CloudFormation console.
Why this is correct
The CloudFormation console Events tab lists all stack events in chronological order, including the specific resource that caused the rollback and the associated error message. This is the most efficient way to quickly identify the resource and error.
- ✗
Check AWS CloudTrail for the UpdateStack API call.
Why it's wrong here
AWS CloudTrail is designed to capture management API calls, so it will record the `UpdateStack` request itself, including the caller, timestamp, and request parameters. However, it does not record the internal, resource-level status transitions or the specific failure reasons that CloudFormation generates during a stack update and rollback; those are stored only as stack events. To reconstruct the root cause from CloudTrail, you would have to identify the update request, then manually cross-reference it with the time range in CloudFormation's event history, which adds extra steps without providing any error detail that isn't already in the stack events.
- ✗
Run describe-stack-resources to list all stack resources.
Why it's wrong here
Running `describe-stack-resources` returns a listing of the stack's resources and their current statuses, such as `UPDATE_FAILED` or `CREATE_COMPLETE`, along with their logical and physical IDs. But this API call does not include any event history or status-reason text, so while it could tell you *which* resource is in a failed state, it cannot tell you *why* that resource failed or what error message was produced. It also doesn't reflect transient events from the rollback sequence itself, making it impossible to identify the triggering failure without consulting the stack events.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every DOP-C02 question from scratch — 1,013 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. 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.