SOA-C02 Cost and Performance Optimization Practice Question
A company wants to monitor the performance of its EC2 instances and receive alerts when CPU utilization exceeds 80% for 10 minutes. Which AWS service should be used?
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
Amazon CloudWatch can monitor CPU utilization metrics for EC2 instances and trigger alarms when a threshold (e.g., 80% for 10 minutes) is exceeded. Option B (AWS CloudTrail) is wrong because it records API activity, not performance metrics. Option C (AWS Config) is wrong because it evaluates resource configurations, not performance. Option D (VPC Flow Logs) is wrong because it captures network traffic information, not CPU usage.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Amazon CloudWatch
Why this is correct
Amazon CloudWatch is the correct choice because it provides a comprehensive monitoring service for EC2 instances. CloudWatch collects and tracks metrics such as CPU utilization, network I/O, and disk activity, which can be visualized in dashboards and evaluated against thresholds. When these metrics breach predefined limits, CloudWatch can trigger Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) alarms to notify operators or initiate automated actions, making it the appropriate tool for performance monitoring and alerting.
- ✗
AWS CloudTrail
Why it's wrong here
AWS CloudTrail is not suitable for performance monitoring because it records API activity and user actions within your AWS account, such as console sign-ins, CLI commands, and SDK calls. While CloudTrail is essential for auditing, security analysis, and operational troubleshooting of who did what, it does not collect or expose performance metrics like CPU utilization or memory usage of EC2 instances. Its logs are event-based and focus on governance, not on the operational health or performance of your resources.
- ✗
AWS Config
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config is designed for configuration tracking and compliance auditing, not for performance monitoring. Config records resource configuration changes, such as instance type modifications, security group rule changes, or tag updates, and evaluates those changes against desired policies. While it can help you understand what changed in your environment, it does not capture real-time performance metrics like CPU or network throughput, so it would not help you monitor EC2 instance performance.
- ✗
VPC Flow Logs
Why it's wrong here
VPC Flow Logs captures information about IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in your VPC, including source and destination addresses, ports, and packet/byte counts. This is invaluable for network diagnostics, security analysis, and traffic optimization, but it does not provide instance-level performance metrics such as CPU utilization, memory usage, or disk I/O. Therefore, VPC Flow Logs cannot be used to monitor the overall performance of an EC2 instance.
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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.