DOP-C02 Incident and Event Response Practice Question
An application running on AWS Lambda is experiencing increased error rates. The DevOps engineer needs to quickly identify the root cause. Which AWS service should the engineer use to analyze the logs and errors?
⚠ Common exam trap
DOP-C02 often tests the distinction between observability services, so candidates pick CloudTrail or Config for application error analysis when those services only cover API auditing and configuration compliance, not runtime tracing.
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
✓
AWS X-Ray
AWS X-Ray is designed for distributed tracing and root-cause analysis of application errors, including Lambda functions. It captures traces, errors, and latency data across services, making it the right tool to quickly identify where failures originate in a Lambda-based application.
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 X-Ray
Why this is correct
AWS X-Ray traces requests through Lambda and downstream services, exposing latency, errors and their causal path. This gives the engineer the distributed tracing needed to pinpoint the root cause of increased error rates, which CloudWatch logs alone would require manual correlation to achieve.
- ✗
AWS Trusted Advisor
Why it's wrong here
Trusted Advisor inspects account-wide best practise across cost, security, fault tolerance and service limits; it holds no per-invocation Lambda log data, so it cannot pinpoint the failing code path. It is tempting because it flags Lambda concurrency and error-rate recommendations, which suits periodic account health reviews rather than live root-cause analysis.
- ✗
AWS Config
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config records resource configuration changes and evaluates compliance against rules; it does not ingest or query Lambda execution logs, so it cannot surface the stack traces behind the errors. It is tempting because Config does track Lambda function settings and versions, which suits auditing configuration drift rather than diagnosing runtime failures.
- ✗
AWS CloudTrail
Why it's wrong here
CloudTrail captures API activity and management events, not the application-level log output or exception details that reveal why Lambda invocations fail. It is tempting because it does record Lambda Invoke calls, making it the right choice for auditing who invoked a function, not for analysing its runtime errors.
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.