DOP-C02 Monitoring and Logging Practice Question
A DevOps engineer is tasked with setting up monitoring for a serverless application that uses AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon DynamoDB. The engineer needs to create a centralized dashboard that displays the number of Lambda invocations, API Gateway request counts, and DynamoDB consumed read/write capacity units. The dashboard should be accessible to the operations team without requiring AWS Management Console login. The engineer also wants to set up email alerts when the DynamoDB consumed capacity exceeds 80% of the provisioned capacity. Which solution meets these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap is overcomplicating the solution with third-party or custom tools; candidates may choose QuickSight or Cognito when native CloudWatch dashboards and alarms already meet the requirements with least overhead.
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
✓
Create a CloudWatch dashboard with the relevant metrics and set CloudWatch alarms on DynamoDB consumed capacity. Share the dashboard as a public read-only dashboard.
A CloudWatch dashboard can display metrics from Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB in one place, and CloudWatch alarms on DynamoDB consumed capacity can trigger email notifications via Amazon SNS. Sharing the dashboard as a public read-only dashboard allows the operations team to view it without AWS Management Console login. This approach uses native AWS monitoring services with minimal setup and no custom code.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use Amazon QuickSight to connect to CloudWatch metrics and create a dashboard with email alerts.
Why it's wrong here
Amazon QuickSight can create visual dashboards from CloudWatch metrics and allows external access without console login, making it tempting for the dashboard requirement. However, QuickSight's alerting capabilities are not designed for direct operational threshold monitoring and email alerts based on CloudWatch Alarms. It would introduce significant overhead to replicate the required DynamoDB capacity alerts. QuickSight is ideal for business intelligence, advanced data visualisation, and combining operational data with other datasets for strategic analysis, rather than simple infrastructure alerting.
- ✗
Use CloudWatch Logs Insights to query the logs of each service and create a dashboard from the results.
Why it's wrong here
CloudWatch Logs Insights is designed for querying and analyzing log data, not for retrieving the numerical CloudWatch metrics emitted by DynamoDB (such as ConsumedReadCapacityUnits or ThrottledRequests). While you could create a dashboard from log query results, those results are derived from log events, not from live metric streams, and Logs Insights cannot set CloudWatch alarms on DynamoDB consumed capacity. This approach would only give you a separate, non-alarmable view of operational data, missing the required automated alerting on capacity consumption.
- ✗
Create a CloudWatch dashboard and share it using Amazon Cognito to grant access to the operations team.
Why it's wrong here
Amazon Cognito is an identity and access management service for user sign-up/sign-in and federation; it is not used to share or secure CloudWatch dashboards. CloudWatch dashboards have their own built-in sharing mechanisms: they can be shared at the account level using IAM permissions or exposed as public read-only dashboards via a generated URL that does not require Cognito. Introducing Cognito would add unnecessary complexity and would not provide the dashboard access mechanism needed for the operations team; public sharing with a read-only URL is the intended approach for this requirement.
- ✓
Create a CloudWatch dashboard with the relevant metrics and set CloudWatch alarms on DynamoDB consumed capacity. Share the dashboard as a public read-only dashboard.
Why this is correct
This is the correct solution because CloudWatch natively supports creating dashboards that display multiple operational metrics, and alarms on DynamoDB consumed capacity can be configured to trigger SNS notifications (e.g., email) when thresholds are exceeded. The dashboard can be shared as a public read-only dashboard using the CloudWatch console's 'Share' feature, which generates a URL that grants view-only access without requiring IAM credentials or Cognito. This directly addresses both the need for at-a-glance monitoring and threshold-based alerting on DynamoDB capacity, making it the most operationally sound and low-overhead option.
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 |
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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.