SAP-C02 Practice Question: Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
A company uses AWS Organizations with consolidated billing. The finance team wants to track costs by department. Each department has its own AWS account. Which feature should be used to map costs to departments?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse cost allocation tags with AWS Budgets or SCPs, mistakenly thinking that SCPs can limit costs or that Budgets can map costs, when in fact only tags provide the granular, reportable metadata needed for cost attribution.
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
✓
Use cost allocation tags to tag resources with a department tag.
Cost allocation tags allow you to tag AWS resources with metadata (e.g., department name) and then activate those tags in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console. Once activated, AWS generates cost reports that break down spending by those tags, enabling the finance team to map costs to each department's account. This is the native, recommended approach for cost attribution across accounts in AWS Organizations.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Use cost allocation tags to tag resources with a department tag.
Why this is correct
Tags can be activated in AWS Cost Explorer to group costs.
- ✗
Use Amazon CloudWatch custom metrics to record department IDs.
Why it's wrong here
CloudWatch does not integrate with cost allocation.
- ✗
Use service control policies (SCPs) to restrict costs per account.
Why it's wrong here
SCPs do not track costs.
- ✗
Use AWS Budgets to create budgets per department.
Why it's wrong here
Budgets do not map costs; they set thresholds.
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Same concept, more angles
2 more ways this is tested on SAP-C02
These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.
Variation 1. A company is using AWS Organizations with consolidated billing. The finance team wants to track costs by business unit. Each business unit has its own AWS account. The team needs a solution that allows them to generate cost reports filtered by business unit without additional overhead. Which action should be taken?
easy- A.Use Cost Explorer to filter by linked account, which automatically groups by business unit.
- B.Use AWS Budgets to create budgets per account and manually aggregate.
- ✓ C.Apply tags to resources and enable cost allocation tags in Billing and Cost Management.
- D.Create a separate payer account for each business unit.
Why C: Applying tags to resources and enabling cost allocation tags in AWS Billing and Cost Management allows the finance team to categorize costs by business unit without additional overhead. Each business unit's AWS account can have resources tagged with a key like 'BusinessUnit', and once cost allocation tags are activated, Cost Explorer and cost reports can filter and group by these tags, providing automated cost tracking across accounts in AWS Organizations.
Variation 2. A company is using AWS Organizations with consolidated billing. They want to track costs by department, where each department has its own AWS account. Which service should they use to tag resources with department IDs and view cost breakdowns?
easy- A.AWS Budgets with tag-based filters.
- B.AWS Trusted Advisor cost optimization checks.
- C.AWS Cost Explorer with tag-based filtering.
- ✓ D.AWS Cost Explorer with cost allocation tags.
Why D: Cost allocation tags in AWS allow you to tag resources (e.g., EC2 instances, S3 buckets) with department IDs and then use AWS Cost Explorer to view cost breakdowns by those tags. This directly meets the requirement to track costs per department account within AWS Organizations with consolidated billing.
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.