DOP-C02 Monitoring and Logging Practice Question
A DevOps engineer wants to monitor the health of an Auto Scaling group and receive notifications when instances are launched or terminated. Which TWO AWS services can be used together to achieve this?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap is selecting CloudTrail or Config for event notifications — candidates confuse auditing/compliance services with real-time event routing and notification, which is EventBridge + SNS.
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 EventBridge.
Amazon EventBridge (option C) is correct because it can capture Auto Scaling group state-change events such as EC2 Instance Launch Successful and EC2 Instance Terminate Successful, and route them to a target for notification. Amazon SNS (option D) is correct because it serves as the notification target, delivering email, SMS, or HTTP messages to subscribers when EventBridge matches those Auto Scaling events. Together, EventBridge detects the launch/termination events and SNS publishes the alerts, which is exactly the monitoring-and-notification pattern requested. AWS CloudTrail (A) only records API activity for auditing and does not natively push notifications, AWS Config (B) evaluates resource compliance and configuration history rather than real-time launch/terminate alerts, and AWS Lambda (E) is a compute target that could process events but is not itself a notification service.
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 CloudTrail.
Why it's wrong here
AWS CloudTrail records API activity and user actions for auditing and governance, but it does not provide a real-time event-routing mechanism to publish notifications. While Auto Scaling lifecycle events such as launch and terminate are logged as CloudTrail events, these records are written asynchronously for post-hoc forensic analysis, not streamed immediately to SNS or other targets. CloudTrail is therefore unsuitable for proactive health monitoring and alerting, because it lacks the pattern matching and low-latency delivery that operational monitoring requires.
- ✗
AWS Config.
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config tracks resource configurations and evaluates them against compliance rules, but it focuses on configuration drift and historical state, not on real-time operational events. Config rules can detect non-compliant resources and trigger remediation, but they evaluate changes after they occur, often with a delay, and they are not designed to continuously monitor Auto Scaling health or emit targeted lifecycle notifications. Config is a governance tool, whereas the question requires an event-driven service capable of immediately routing lifecycle changes to a notification channel.
- ✓
Amazon EventBridge.
Why this is correct
Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus that can natively consume Auto Scaling group state changes such as EC2 instance launch, terminate, and lifecycle hook notifications. Using event patterns that filter on the aws.autoscaling source and detail types like EC2 Instance Launch Successful, EventBridge matches relevant events in near real time and routes them to targets such as SNS topics for email/SMS alerts. It is the correct service because it provides built-in event ingestion, filtering, and routing without requiring custom code or external monitoring agents, making it ideal for health and lifecycle monitoring.
- ✓
Amazon SNS.
Why this is correct
Amazon SNS is a pub/sub messaging service that delivers notifications to subscribers via email, SMS, HTTP, or other endpoints, but it does not itself monitor or detect Auto Scaling health status. To be useful in this scenario, SNS must receive the lifecycle event from an event source like EventBridge; once the event arrives, SNS fans out the alert to the appropriate recipients. While SNS is a critical component of the alerting pipeline, it is not the monitoring mechanism, so its correctness depends on being paired with EventBridge to provide the event detection and routing.
- ✗
AWS Lambda.
Why it's wrong here
Lambda lacks the native capability to monitor resource state changes or trigger notifications autonomously. It requires an external event source, such as Amazon EventBridge, to execute code in response to Auto Scaling events. While Lambda is useful for executing custom logic or data transformations once a signal is received, it cannot serve as the primary monitoring mechanism required to detect and report instance lifecycle transitions on its own.
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.