SOA-C02 Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation Practice Question
A SysOps administrator is setting up a CloudWatch dashboard to monitor an application. The application runs on an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The administrator wants to track the number of healthy hosts and the request count per target group. Which two metrics should be used? (Choose TWO.)
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse ALB-level metrics (like `RequestCount` per ALB or `ActiveConnectionCount`) with target-group-level metrics, or assume `HealthyHostCount` exists at the ALB level, when in fact it is only available per target group.
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
✓
HealthyHostCount (per TargetGroup)
`HealthyHostCount` (per TargetGroup) is a CloudWatch metric that reports the number of healthy EC2 instances in a specific target group, which directly indicates the health of the backend fleet. Option D is correct because `RequestCount` (per TargetGroup) tracks the number of requests routed to that target group, allowing the administrator to correlate traffic load with host health. Together, these two metrics provide the exact visibility needed for an Auto Scaling group behind an ALB.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
HealthyHostCount (per TargetGroup)
Why this is correct
HealthyHostCount with the TargetGroup dimension reports the number of targets (EC2 instances, IP addresses, or Lambda functions) that pass the configured health checks for that specific target group. This provides direct, per-service visibility into backend capacity and is the correct metric for a dashboard focused on target-group health because the TargetGroup dimension precisely isolates the health of one group.
- ✗
RequestCount (per ALB)
Why it's wrong here
RequestCount at the ALB level aggregates all requests across every target group and listener rule the load balancer serves, so a spike can come from one busy service while another target group is unhealthy. Without the TargetGroup dimension you cannot distinguish which backend received the requests, making it unsuitable for per-target-group health or routing analysis in this dashboard.
- ✗
ActiveConnectionCount
Why it's wrong here
ActiveConnectionCount is a load-balancer-level metric that measures the number of concurrent client connections to the ALB, not the health state of registered targets. It has no TargetGroup dimension and is not derived from health checks, so it cannot tell you whether specific hosts are healthy; an ALB can have many active connections while a target group is completely unhealthy.
- ✓
RequestCount (per TargetGroup)
Why this is correct
RequestCount with the TargetGroup dimension shows the number of requests that the ALB actually routed to the targets in that specific target group. It is a valid per-target-group metric, but for a dashboard focused on healthy-host availability it does not directly expose whether targets are healthy—it exposes traffic volume, so it supports monitoring but is not the primary health indicator.
- ✗
HealthyHostCount (per ALB)
Why it's wrong here
HealthyHostCount is not published as a standalone 'per ALB' metric; the metric is emitted in the ApplicationELB namespace but is meaningful only when queried with the TargetGroup dimension. A query that omits TargetGroup either returns no HealthyHostCount series or forces you to manually composite across groups, which masks which target group owns the unhealthy hosts and defeats the purpose of a per-target-group health dashboard.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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