SOA-C02 Cost and Performance Optimization Practice Question
A company wants to receive alerts when its AWS costs exceed a certain threshold. Which AWS service should be used?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse AWS Budgets with AWS Cost Explorer, assuming Cost Explorer can send alerts, when in fact Cost Explorer is only a reporting and analysis tool without native alerting capabilities.
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 Budgets
AWS Budgets allows you to set custom cost and usage budgets and receive alerts when actual or forecasted costs exceed a defined threshold. It directly supports cost-based alerting with actions such as sending an SNS notification or applying an IAM policy to restrict resources when the budget limit is breached.
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 it's wrong here
Monitors resource metrics, not cost thresholds natively.
- ✗
AWS Cost Explorer
Why it's wrong here
Visualizes costs, but does not send alerts.
- ✗
AWS Trusted Advisor
Why it's wrong here
Provides cost optimization checks, but not budget alerts.
- ✓
AWS Budgets
Why this is correct
Allows setting cost budgets and sending alerts.
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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.