DOP-C02 Monitoring and Logging Practice Question
A company wants to receive notifications when an EC2 instance's CPU utilization exceeds 90% for 10 consecutive minutes. Which AWS service 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 alarm
Amazon CloudWatch alarms monitor specified metrics (like CPU utilization) and trigger actions (e.g., SNS notification) when a threshold is breached for a given period. Option A is correct. Option B is incorrect because AWS Config rules evaluate configuration compliance, not metric thresholds. Option C is incorrect because AWS CloudTrail records API activity, not metric monitoring. Option D is incorrect because Amazon Inspector assesses security vulnerabilities, not performance metrics.
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 CloudWatch alarm
Why this is correct
A CloudWatch alarm is the correct mechanism because it continuously evaluates an EC2 instance's time-series metrics, such as CPUUtilization or StatusCheckFailed, against a defined threshold. When the metric crosses the threshold, the alarm state transitions to ALARM and automatically publishes a message to an SNS topic, which can deliver email, SMS, or invoke a Lambda function. Alarms can also be configured to perform EC2 actions like stop or reboot, making them the native AWS service for threshold-based metric notification.
- ✗
AWS Config rule
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config rules are designed to assess whether an EC2 instance's configuration conforms to desired policies, such as enforcing a specific instance type, checking that EBS volumes are encrypted, or verifying required tags. They evaluate static resource attributes at periodic intervals or on configuration changes, not real-time operational metrics like CPU load. Config rules do not monitor metric thresholds and cannot trigger an alarm when a utilization metric rises; they are a compliance and governance tool, not a monitoring and alerting service.
- ✗
AWS CloudTrail event
Why it's wrong here
AWS CloudTrail records API activity in your account, capturing actions like RunInstances, StopInstances, or TerminateInstances along with the identity of the caller and the source IP address. These log files are used for security auditing, operational forensics, and governance. CloudTrail does not process metric data from EC2 instances and has no concept of thresholds; while you can create an EventBridge rule to react to CloudTrail API events, that is fundamentally different from reacting to an exceeded metric threshold such as high CPU utilization.
- ✗
Amazon Inspector
Why it's wrong here
Amazon Inspector is a vulnerability management service that uses an agent to scan EC2 instances for software vulnerabilities, unintended network exposure, and deviations from security best practices like CIS benchmarks. It produces findings with severity ratings, but it does not collect or evaluate instance performance metrics such as CPU or memory utilization. Consequently, Inspector cannot raise a notification when a metric threshold is crossed; its purpose is security assessment, not operational health monitoring.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every DOP-C02 question from scratch — 1,298 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.