SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question
A company is using an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in front of an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances. The application has a health check endpoint at /health. Recently, the ALB is marking instances as unhealthy even though the application is running. The health check settings are: interval 30 seconds, timeout 5 seconds, unhealthy threshold 2. What is the most likely cause?
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
✓
The health check timeout of 5 seconds is too short for the application to respond.
A timeout of 5 seconds may be insufficient if the application's /health endpoint takes longer to respond due to high load or backend processing. The ALB expects a response within the timeout; if not received, it marks the instance unhealthy. Option A is wrong because a 30-second interval is standard and not too long; reducing it would increase load but not fix the timeout issue. Option B is wrong because an unhealthy threshold of 2 is reasonable; lowering it would mark instances unhealthy more quickly but does not address the root cause of slow responses. Option D is wrong because the path /health is accessible (the application is running), so the ALB can reach it; the problem is the response time.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
The health check interval of 30 seconds is too long.
Why it's wrong here
Longer interval doesn't cause false negatives.
- ✗
The unhealthy threshold of 2 is too high.
Why it's wrong here
Higher threshold means more tolerance, not false negatives.
- ✓
The health check timeout of 5 seconds is too short for the application to respond.
Why this is correct
A short timeout can cause false unhealthy markings.
- ✗
The health check path /health is not accessible from the ALB.
Why it's wrong here
If not accessible, it would consistently fail, not intermittently.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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.