SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question
A company has a production AWS account with multiple VPCs connected via a transit gateway. The security team wants to centrally capture all VPC flow logs for analysis in Amazon Athena. What is the MOST cost-effective way to store the flow logs?
⚠ Common exam trap
SAP-C02 often tests whether candidates default to CloudWatch Logs for log aggregation out of habit, missing that direct S3 delivery plus Intelligent-Tiering is the cost-optimized pattern for high-volume log analytics.
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
✓
Publish VPC Flow Logs to an Amazon S3 bucket with S3 Intelligent-Tiering enabled.
VPC Flow Logs can be published directly to Amazon S3, and S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves objects between frequent and infrequent access tiers based on usage patterns, minimizing storage cost for log data that is queried sporadically by Athena. This avoids CloudWatch Logs ingestion and storage charges, which are significantly higher per GB.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Publish VPC Flow Logs to an Amazon S3 bucket with S3 Intelligent-Tiering enabled.
Why this is correct
S3 is cost-effective for log storage, and Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves data to lower-cost tiers.
- ✗
Publish VPC Flow Logs to both CloudWatch Logs and S3 for redundancy.
Why it's wrong here
Dual delivery doubles storage costs.
- ✗
Use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to stream flow logs to an S3 bucket.
Why it's wrong here
Kinesis Firehose adds unnecessary cost and complexity.
- ✗
Publish VPC Flow Logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs and export them to S3 after 30 days.
Why it's wrong here
CloudWatch Logs costs more than direct S3 delivery.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
Go deeper
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This SAP-C02 question is part of Courseiva's 984-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam 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 SAP-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 SAP-C02 exam.