This DOP-C02 practice question tests your understanding of incident and event response. This is a configuration task: choose the command set that satisfies every stated requirement. Small differences — like 'secret' vs 'password' or 'transport input ssh' vs 'all' — change whether the answer is correct. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
A DevOps engineer receives an alarm that an EC2 instance's CPU utilization has exceeded 90% for 5 minutes. The engineer needs to automatically recover the instance. Which AWS service should be used to configure automatic recovery?
Amazon CloudWatch Alarms
CloudWatch alarms can initiate EC2 AutoRecovery by setting 'recover' action.
AWS Lambda
Why wrong: Lambda can be used but requires custom logic; CloudWatch is the native solution.
AWS Systems Manager Automation
Why wrong: Systems Manager Automation is for runbooks, not automatic instance recovery.
EC2 Auto Scaling
Why wrong: Auto Scaling launches new instances but does not recover a specific failed instance.
Answer choices
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 can be configured to trigger an EC2 instance recovery action when a metric like CPU utilization exceeds a threshold (e.g., 90% for 5 minutes). The alarm sends a signal to the EC2 service, which automatically recovers the instance by stopping it and starting it on a new underlying host, preserving the instance ID, private IP, and Elastic IP. This is the native, built-in mechanism for automatic instance recovery without requiring additional compute or orchestration services.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
Amazon CloudWatch Alarms
Why this is correct
CloudWatch alarms can initiate EC2 AutoRecovery by setting 'recover' action.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
AWS Lambda
Why it's wrong here
Lambda can be used but requires custom logic; CloudWatch is the native solution.
AWS Systems Manager Automation
Why it's wrong here
Systems Manager Automation is for runbooks, not automatic instance recovery.
EC2 Auto Scaling
Why it's wrong here
Auto Scaling launches new instances but does not recover a specific failed instance.
Common exam traps
The trap here is that candidates often confuse EC2 Auto Scaling (which replaces instances) with automatic recovery (which recovers the same instance), or they overcomplicate the solution by choosing Lambda or Systems Manager when a simple CloudWatch Alarm action is the correct and native AWS mechanism.
Detailed technical explanation
The EC2 automatic recovery feature works by using a CloudWatch Alarm that monitors the StatusCheckFailed metric (not CPU utilization) in a real-world scenario; however, the question specifies CPU utilization, which is a valid metric for triggering recovery via a CloudWatch Alarm action. Under the hood, the recovery action sends a RecoverInstances API call that moves the instance to a new healthy host while maintaining its instance ID, private IP, and Elastic IP, but any in-memory data is lost. A subtle behavior is that automatic recovery is only supported on certain instance types (e.g., C3, C4, M3, M4, R3, R4, T2, T3) and requires the instance to be in a VPC with an EBS root volume.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
An e-commerce site experiences heavy traffic on Black Friday and near-zero traffic during off-peak weeks. Rather than provisioning permanent large VMs, the team uses auto-scaling groups that add capacity automatically under load and reduce it overnight. Questions like this test whether you understand elasticity, availability zones, and cloud compute scaling patterns.
What to study next
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FAQ
Incident and Event Response — This question tests Incident and Event Response — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
The correct answer is: Amazon CloudWatch Alarms — Amazon CloudWatch Alarms can be configured to trigger an EC2 instance recovery action when a metric like CPU utilization exceeds a threshold (e.g., 90% for 5 minutes). The alarm sends a signal to the EC2 service, which automatically recovers the instance by stopping it and starting it on a new underlying host, preserving the instance ID, private IP, and Elastic IP. This is the native, built-in mechanism for automatic instance recovery without requiring additional compute or orchestration services.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Last reviewed: Jun 24, 2026
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.
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