SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question
A company runs a critical application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The application uses a custom health check that reports instance health to Amazon CloudWatch. The Auto Scaling group is configured with an EC2 health check type. Recently, the company noticed that instances failing the custom health check are not being terminated and replaced. What should the solutions architect do to ensure that instances failing the custom health check are automatically replaced?
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
✓
Change the Auto Scaling group health check type to ELB and ensure the custom health check is integrated with the ELB target group.
Auto Scaling only uses EC2 status checks (system/reachability) by default. To use a custom health check, you must configure the Auto Scaling group to use ELB health checks and integrate the custom health check with the ELB target group, so that instances failing the custom check are marked unhealthy by the ELB and automatically replaced. Option A is wrong because manually terminating instances is not automated and defeats the purpose of Auto Scaling. Option B is wrong because instance metadata cannot be used to report custom health to Auto Scaling; it only provides instance metadata, not health information. Option C is wrong because a CloudWatch alarm alone cannot terminate instances; you would need a lifecycle hook or EventBridge to act on the alarm.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Manually terminate the unhealthy instances from the EC2 console.
Why it's wrong here
Manual intervention defeats the purpose of automation.
- ✗
Configure the Auto Scaling group to use instance metadata to report health.
Why it's wrong here
Instance metadata does not report health to Auto Scaling; Auto Scaling uses EC2 status checks or ELB health checks.
- ✗
Create a CloudWatch alarm based on the custom health check metric and configure the alarm to terminate the instance.
Why it's wrong here
CloudWatch alarms do not have an action to terminate instances directly; you would need a lifecycle hook or Lambda.
- ✓
Change the Auto Scaling group health check type to ELB and ensure the custom health check is integrated with the ELB target group.
Why this is correct
ELB health checks can be customized via the target group, and Auto Scaling will replace instances that fail ELB health checks.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This SAP-C02 question is part of Courseiva's 1,660-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 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.