SOA-C02 Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation Practice Question
A company uses AWS Organizations to manage multiple accounts. The security team needs a centralized view of all API calls made across all accounts. Which solution should the SysOps administrator implement?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse AWS Config (which tracks configuration changes) with CloudTrail (which tracks API calls), or assume that individual account trails are sufficient for a centralized view, overlooking the simplicity and automatic coverage of an organization trail.
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
✓
Create a CloudTrail trail in the management account that logs events for all accounts in the organization.
AWS CloudTrail supports an organization trail that, when created in the management account, automatically logs API calls for all member accounts in the AWS Organization. This provides a centralized, single point of access to all API activity across the organization without needing to configure individual trails per account.
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 AWS Config aggregator to view configuration changes across accounts.
Why it's wrong here
The AWS Config aggregator is designed to collect configuration and compliance snapshots from multiple accounts and regions into a single view, but it cannot capture or display API activity logs. It records resource configuration changes over time, not the identity or timing of the API calls that triggered those changes. For an audit trail of user and service actions across all accounts, CloudTrail is the required service.
- ✓
Create a CloudTrail trail in the management account that logs events for all accounts in the organization.
Why this is correct
Creating a CloudTrail trail in the management account with organization-wide logging enabled automatically applies to every account and all regions in your AWS organization. This organization trail centralizes API activity logs into a single S3 bucket in the management account, ensuring you have a complete, consolidated audit record. It also includes new member accounts as they are added, eliminating the need to configure trails individually in each account.
- ✗
Use CloudWatch cross-account dashboards to view metrics from all accounts.
Why it's wrong here
CloudWatch cross-account dashboards let you aggregate operational metrics such as CPU utilization, latency, and custom application metrics from multiple accounts into a unified visual display. They do not ingest or store API call history, so they cannot be used to audit who performed which actions in your accounts. API logging is handled by CloudTrail, not CloudWatch metrics or dashboards.
- ✗
Enable CloudTrail in each account and have each account send logs to its own S3 bucket.
Why it's wrong here
While enabling CloudTrail in each account and writing to separate S3 buckets does capture API activity, it fragments the audit data across many locations. This makes searching, monitoring, and enforcing retention policies more complex, and any new member account requires manual trail configuration. An organization trail in the management account delivers a single, consolidated log stream to one bucket, making it the preferred approach for centralized security and compliance.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This SOA-C02 question is part of Courseiva's 1,169-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 SOA-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 SOA-C02 exam.