Question 1easymultiple choice
Full question →easymultiple choiceObjective-mapped
A company uses Amazon CloudWatch to monitor its Amazon EC2 instances. The SysOps administrator wants to receive an email notification when any EC2 instance's CPUUtilization metric exceeds 90% for 5 consecutive minutes. Which combination of services should be used to meet this requirement with the least operational overhead?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Good practice is not just finding the correct option. The wrong answers often show the exact trap the exam wants you to fall into.
A
Distractor review
Create a CloudWatch Logs metric filter and a Lambda function that sends email via SES
This is overly complex. CPUUtilization is a metric, not a log, so a metric filter is not applicable. Lambda would add unnecessary overhead.
B
Best answer
Create a CloudWatch metric alarm that sends a notification to an Amazon SNS topic subscribed with email endpoints
This directly meets the requirement. The alarm monitors the metric and triggers SNS to send emails.
C
Distractor review
Create a CloudWatch Events rule that matches EC2 instance state changes and sends to SQS with a Lambda consumer
CloudWatch Events is for state changes (e.g., instance start/stop), not for metric threshold breaches. SQS and Lambda add complexity.
D
Distractor review
Configure a CloudWatch dashboard that displays CPU utilization and share it with the team
A dashboard only visualizes data; it does not send alerts or notifications.
Common exam trap
Common exam trap: NAT rules depend on direction and matching traffic
NAT is not only about the public address. The inside/outside interface roles and the ACL or rule that matches traffic are just as important.
Technical deep dive
How to think about this question
NAT questions usually test address translation, overload/PAT behaviour, static mappings and whether the right traffic is being translated. Read the interface direction and address terms carefully.
KKey Concepts to Remember
- Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
- PAT allows many inside hosts to share one public address using ports.
- Inside local and inside global describe the private and translated addresses.
- NAT ACLs identify traffic for translation, not always security filtering.
TExam Day Tips
- Identify inside and outside interfaces first.
- Check whether the scenario needs static NAT, dynamic NAT or PAT.
- Do not confuse NAT matching ACLs with normal packet-filtering intent.
Related practice questions
Related SOA-C02 practice-question pages
Use these pages to review the topic behind this question. This is how one missed question becomes focused revision.
More questions from this exam
Keep practising from the same exam bank, or move into a focused topic page if this question exposed a weak area.
Question 1
A company uses Amazon CloudFront to deliver content to a global audience. The origin is an Application Load Balancer in us-east-1. The SysOps administrator wants to reduce costs by minimizing the number of requests that reach the origin server. Which action should the administrator take?
Question 2
A company runs a batch processing application on Amazon EC2 that runs for 2 hours every night. The workload can tolerate interruptions. Which EC2 purchasing option provides the lowest cost for this use case?
Question 3
A SysOps administrator needs to monitor the CPU utilization of an Amazon RDS DB instance and receive an alarm when CPU utilization exceeds 80% for 5 consecutive minutes. Which AWS service should be used to create this alarm?
Question 4
A company runs a critical web application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application uses session stickiness (sticky sessions) to maintain user sessions. The SysOps administrator notices that when instances are replaced during a scale-in or failure event, users lose their session data. The administrator needs to preserve session data across instance failures without losing stickiness benefits. What should the administrator do?
Question 5
A company runs a production web application on a single Amazon EC2 instance. The application experiences a predictable and steady workload 24/7. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize compute costs for this instance while ensuring it remains available during the expected workload. Which EC2 purchasing option should the administrator use?
Question 6
A company has a VPC with public and private subnets. The private subnets host application servers that need to make outbound HTTPS connections to the internet. The SysOps administrator must implement a solution that provides outbound internet connectivity while preventing inbound connections from the internet. Additionally, the solution must allow the company to control which domains the application servers can access. Which solution should the administrator implement?
FAQ
Questions learners often ask
What does this SOA-C02 question test?
Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Create a CloudWatch metric alarm that sends a notification to an Amazon SNS topic subscribed with email endpoints — Amazon CloudWatch metric alarms can monitor a specific metric and trigger an action when the threshold is breached for a specified number of consecutive periods. The action can be to send a notification to an Amazon SNS topic, which can then deliver the message via email, SMS, etc. This is the simplest and most direct way to achieve email alerts based on a metric threshold. CloudWatch Logs is for log data, not metrics. CloudWatch Events is for event-driven actions but requires custom logic. CloudWatch dashboards are for visualization, not alerts.
What should I do if I get this SOA-C02 question wrong?
Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.
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