DOP-C02 Monitoring and Logging Practice Question
A company wants to monitor the number of messages in an Amazon SQS queue and send an alert if the queue depth exceeds 1000 for more than 5 minutes. Which AWS service should be used to create the alarm?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse EventBridge's ability to react to SQS metric changes (via CloudWatch metric streams) with the actual alarm evaluation logic, but EventBridge cannot perform threshold-based monitoring over a time window—only CloudWatch Alarms can.
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 Alarms
Amazon CloudWatch Alarms is the correct service because it can monitor SQS queue metrics (such as ApproximateNumberOfMessagesVisible) and trigger an alarm when the metric exceeds a threshold (e.g., 1000) for a specified evaluation period (e.g., 5 minutes). CloudWatch Alarms directly integrate with SQS via the AWS/SQS namespace and support actions like sending notifications through Amazon SNS.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Amazon EventBridge
Why it's wrong here
Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus designed to route events between AWS services and integrate with event-driven architectures, but it does not evaluate metric thresholds or perform continuous monitoring of numerical values. While you could configure EventBridge to react to a CloudWatch alarm's state change, the alarm itself must still be created in CloudWatch. Therefore, EventBridge is not the service that directly monitors message count for SQS.
- ✓
Amazon CloudWatch Alarms
Why this is correct
Amazon CloudWatch Alarms are the correct choice because they continuously monitor a specified CloudWatch metric—such as ApproximateNumberOfMessagesVisible for an SQS queue—against a defined threshold over a configured period. When the metric crosses the threshold, the alarm changes state (OK, ALARM, or INSUFFICIENT_DATA) and can trigger an action like an SNS notification, EC2 Auto Scaling, or an arbitrary EC2 stop/terminate action. This provides the exact metric-threshold monitoring required.
- ✗
AWS X-Ray
Why it's wrong here
AWS X-Ray is a distributed tracing service that helps developers analyze and debug applications by collecting request-level traces, service maps, and performance data, but it does not monitor queue depth or other aggregate CloudWatch metrics. X-Ray focuses on end-to-end request paths, latency, and errors across microservices rather than threshold-based metric alarms. Therefore, it is unsuitable for alerting on SQS message count.
- ✗
Amazon CloudWatch Logs
Why it's wrong here
Amazon CloudWatch Logs is designed to aggregate, store, and query log data from AWS resources and applications using features like Logs Insights, and it does not directly monitor real-time metric values such as queue depth. Although you could create a metric filter from log events to generate a custom CloudWatch metric, that is not applicable to SQS's built-in per-queue metrics, and it still requires a CloudWatch alarm to react to threshold breaches. Thus, CloudWatch Logs alone cannot serve as the monitoring alarm.
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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.