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
Cost Explorer visualises and analyses historical spend through reports and forecasts; it displays data rather than evaluating a threshold and dispatching notifications. It is tempting because it is the primary cost-analysis console, and would be correct for investigating which services drove a past increase, not for automated budget alerts.
- ✗
AWS Trusted Advisor
Why it's wrong here
Trusted Advisor inspects account configuration against best-practise checks and reports findings; it does not track spend against a threshold or trigger notifications. It is tempting because it surfaces cost-optimisation recommendations, and would be correct for reviewing idle resources or reserved-instance coverage rather than alerting on a budget breach.
- ✓
AWS Budgets
Why this is correct
AWS Budgets lets you define a cost budget with a threshold and configure alerts that trigger when actual or forecast spend exceeds it, directly satisfying the requirement to be notified when costs cross a set limit. CloudWatch billing alarms alone cannot express budget thresholds.
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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.