DOP-C02 Incident and Event Response Practice Question
A DevOps engineer is setting up an incident response system for a critical application. The engineer needs to ensure that notifications are sent to the appropriate team when specific CloudWatch alarms trigger. Which TWO services can be used to trigger notifications based on CloudWatch alarms? (Choose TWO.)
⚠ Common exam trap
DOP-C02 often tests the confusion between services that can be alarm actions (SNS, Lambda, Auto Scaling) and services that deliver human-readable notifications (SNS, Chatbot), causing candidates to pick Lambda or SQS incorrectly.
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 Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is correct because CloudWatch alarm actions natively support publishing to an SNS topic, which then fans out notifications via email, SMS, or HTTP/S endpoints to the appropriate team. AWS Chatbot is correct because it integrates with SNS topics and CloudWatch alarms to deliver formatted notifications directly into team chat channels such as Slack or Amazon Chime. AWS Systems Manager is not a notification service; it handles operational tasks like patching and automation, not alarm-driven alerts. Amazon SQS is a message queue that can receive alarm actions but does not itself send notifications to people. AWS Lambda can be invoked by an alarm but is a compute service that must be coded to send notifications, so it is not a notification service by itself.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
AWS Systems Manager
Why it's wrong here
AWS Systems Manager is an operations and management service that provides features like Run Command, Patch Manager, Automation, and Parameter Store to administer EC2 instances and hybrid workloads. While SSM can integrate with other services to trigger actions or send status messages, it is not a notification service and does not natively deliver alerts to endpoints like email, SMS, or chat channels. Its role in incident response is to remediate issues after a notification is received, not to generate or distribute the notification itself.
- ✓
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Why this is correct
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a fully managed pub/sub messaging service designed specifically to deliver messages to a large number of subscribers across multiple protocols, including email, SMS, mobile push, HTTP/S, Lambda, SQS, and AWS Chatbot. For incident response, SNS topics receive alerts from CloudWatch Alarms or EventBridge rules and fan out to all subscribed endpoints, ensuring that on-call engineers are notified reliably via their preferred channel. Its message delivery retry policies, dead-letter queues, and subscription filtering make it the core AWS-native notification service for operational alerts.
- ✗
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Why it's wrong here
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a message-queue service used for decoupling application components by buffering messages that are then polled by consumers. Unlike SNS, SQS is pull-based and does not actively push notifications to users or external systems; messages remain in the queue until a consumer processes them. While SQS can be a subscriber to an SNS topic (e.g., to queue alarm events for downstream processing), it is not a notification endpoint for directly alerting incident responders via email, SMS, or chat.
- ✓
AWS Chatbot
Why this is correct
AWS Chatbot is a managed service that connects AWS monitoring and operational data to collaboration platforms such as Slack and Amazon Chime, allowing teams to receive and act on incident notifications directly in chat rooms. It subscribes to SNS topics to receive CloudWatch alarm and EventBridge event notifications, and it can also execute runbook responses via commands like ack or resolve. In an incident-response system, Chatbot is a valid notification endpoint when the team uses ChatOps, but it relies on SNS as the underlying delivery mechanism, so it is not a standalone replacement for SNS itself.
- ✗
AWS Lambda
Why it's wrong here
AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that executes code in response to events, and while it can be triggered by SNS notifications to automate incident-response actions (e.g., posting to a chat, escalating, or invoking a runbook), it is not a notification channel itself. Lambda has no native ability to deliver messages directly to humans via email, SMS, or chat; any such delivery would require additional services like SES, SNS, or a webhook integration. Treating Lambda as an endpoint would confuse event-driven processing with the actual notification delivery that SNS provides.
Quick reference
Cloud Service Model Comparison
| Model | You Manage | Provider Manages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, apps, data | Hardware, hypervisor, networking | EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine |
| PaaS | Apps and data | OS, runtime, middleware, hardware | Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service |
| SaaS | Data and settings only | Everything else | Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Workday |
| FaaS / Serverless | Function code only | Infra, scaling, runtime | Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run |
| CaaS | Containers and apps | Kubernetes, OS, hardware | EKS, AKS, GKE |
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 and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Amazon Web Services exam blueprint
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.