SOA-C02 Cost and Performance Optimization Practice Question
A company uses multiple AWS accounts and needs to generate a detailed cost and usage report that can be queried using Amazon Athena for custom analysis. Which AWS service should the administrator enable?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse AWS Cost Explorer's interactive dashboard with the raw, queryable data format of CUR, assuming Cost Explorer can export data in a format suitable for Athena, when in fact it only provides CSV exports of aggregated views, not the full normalized dataset.
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
✓
AWS Cost and Usage Reports
AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) is the correct service because it generates detailed cost and usage data in CSV or Parquet format, which can be directly queried using Amazon Athena via integration with AWS Glue and Amazon QuickSight. This enables custom analysis and ad-hoc queries on the full billing dataset, unlike other services that provide pre-aggregated views or alerts.
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 Cost Explorer
Why it's wrong here
Cost Explorer offers interactive visualizations and ad-hoc filtering of cost data, but it lacks native integration with Athena or automated delivery of fine-grained usage data to S3 for SQL querying. While you can manually export CSVs, the data is not partitioned or delivered in a query-optimized format like Parquet, making it unsuitable for the described multi-account analytical requirement.
- ✗
AWS Budgets
Why it's wrong here
AWS Budgets is designed for proactive cost monitoring and alerts based on defined thresholds, not for generating comprehensive usage reports. It doesn't produce granular or raw data exports to S3, and its data is not available for Athena queries, so it cannot serve as the data source for this analytical workload.
- ✓
AWS Cost and Usage Reports
Why this is correct
The AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) can be configured to deliver granular, hourly or daily line items to an S3 bucket in either CSV or Parquet format. CUR integrates natively with Athena, allowing you to create a table and run SQL queries over the data, making it the correct choice for multi-account cost analysis. The Parquet format is columnar and optimized for query performance, and CUR includes account-level dimensions for filtering across all linked accounts.
- ✗
AWS Application Cost Profiler
Why it's wrong here
AWS Application Cost Profiler is intended for software vendors that need to measure and report the cost of running a specific application on behalf of customers. It does not provide a complete enterprise-wide cost and usage dataset for a company using multiple AWS accounts, nor does it deliver data in a format suitable for Athena analysis; its focus is on allocating aggregated costs to applications, not raw usage data.
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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.