SOA-C02 Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation Practice Question
A SysOps administrator needs to monitor the CPU utilization of an EC2 instance and receive an alert when it exceeds 80% for 10 consecutive minutes. Which AWS service should be used to configure this monitoring and alerting?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse Amazon EventBridge (which can trigger actions based on events but cannot natively evaluate sustained metric thresholds) with CloudWatch Alarms, or mistakenly think AWS Config or Trusted Advisor can monitor real-time performance metrics, when they are designed for configuration compliance and best-practice recommendations respectively.
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 Alarms
Amazon CloudWatch Alarms is the correct service because it allows you to monitor a specific metric, such as EC2 CPUUtilization, and trigger an action (e.g., an SNS notification) when the metric crosses a defined threshold (80%) for a specified number of consecutive evaluation periods (10 minutes, which with the default 1-minute period equals 10 datapoints). This directly fulfills the requirement for threshold-based alerting on a single metric over a sustained duration.
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 EventBridge
Why it's wrong here
Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus designed to deliver a stream of real-time events, such as AWS service state changes or scheduled events, to targets like Lambda or Step Functions. It does not continuously sample metrics or evaluate thresholds over time, so it cannot monitor CPU utilization on its own; you would first need custom logic to publish utilization events. Therefore, EventBridge is not the correct service for direct metric monitoring.
- ✓
Amazon CloudWatch Alarms
Why this is correct
Amazon CloudWatch Alarms monitor a CloudWatch metric, such as EC2 CPUUtilization, against a defined threshold over a specified number of consecutive evaluation periods. When the alarm transitions to ALARM, OK, or INSUFFICIENT_DATA, it can trigger actions like Auto Scaling policies or SNS notifications. This allows you to detect sustained high CPU usage and respond automatically, making it the correct choice for monitoring CPU utilization.
- ✗
AWS Trusted Advisor
Why it's wrong here
AWS Trusted Advisor performs configuration-based checks against AWS best practices and provides recommendations across cost optimization, performance, security, fault tolerance, and service limits. It does not ingest time-series metrics or allow you to set custom thresholds for CPU utilization, as its checks evaluate the current state of resources, not dynamic operational metrics. Therefore, Trusted Advisor cannot alert you when CPU usage crosses a threshold.
- ✗
AWS Config
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config records configuration changes to AWS resources and evaluates those configurations against compliance rules, which is useful for auditing resource settings and detecting drift. However, it does not analyze performance metrics like CPU utilization, because such values are ephemeral operational data emitted by CloudWatch, not configuration items. As a result, AWS Config cannot monitor real-time CPU load and is unsuitable for this use case.
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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.