PAS-C01 Operations and Maintenance Practice Question
A company is running SAP on AWS and wants to send alerts when the CPU utilization of an EC2 instance exceeds 90% for 5 minutes. Which AWS service should be used to create this alarm?
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
✓
Amazon CloudWatch Alarms
Amazon CloudWatch Alarms (Option D) are the correct AWS service for creating alarms based on metrics such as CPU utilization. They monitor CloudWatch metrics and perform actions (e.g., send notifications via SNS) when thresholds are breached. Option A (AWS Lambda) can be a target action for an alarm but is not the alarm service itself. Option B (AWS Config) evaluates resource configurations against rules, not metric thresholds. Option C (Amazon SNS) is a notification service that can be triggered by CloudWatch Alarms but does not create 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.
- ✗
AWS Lambda
Why it's wrong here
Lambda can be invoked by alarms but does not create alarms.
- ✗
AWS Config
Why it's wrong here
Config evaluates resource configurations, not performance metrics.
- ✗
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Why it's wrong here
SNS delivers messages but does not monitor metrics.
- ✓
Amazon CloudWatch Alarms
Why this is correct
CloudWatch Alarms monitor metrics and send notifications when thresholds are breached.
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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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PAS-C01 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 PAS-C01 exam.