SOA-C02 Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation Practice Question
A SysOps administrator needs to monitor the CPU utilization of an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. The administrator wants to receive a notification when the average CPU utilization exceeds 80% for 10 consecutive minutes. Which steps should the administrator take to set up this monitoring?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse Enhanced Monitoring (which provides OS-level metrics like memory and disk I/O) with the standard CloudWatch metrics, leading them to incorrectly think Enhanced Monitoring is required for CPU utilization alarms.
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
✓
Create a CloudWatch alarm on the 'CPUUtilization' metric with a threshold of 80% and an SNS topic for notifications.
Amazon RDS automatically publishes the 'CPUUtilization' metric to CloudWatch, and a CloudWatch alarm can be configured with a threshold of 80% for the 'Average' statistic over a period of 10 consecutive minutes (e.g., 10 evaluation periods of 1 minute each). The alarm can then trigger an SNS topic to send notifications when the threshold is breached. This directly meets the requirement without additional services.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use CloudWatch Logs to monitor the database logs and create an alarm based on log patterns.
Why it's wrong here
CloudWatch Logs is designed for ingesting, storing, and analyzing log file data, not for tracking numeric performance metrics. While a metric filter could count occurrences of log patterns, it cannot parse CPU utilization percentages from RDS database logs, which generally do not contain CPU status. CPU utilization monitoring requires the RDS-published CloudWatch metric rather than log-based alerting.
- ✗
Enable Enhanced Monitoring and create an alarm on the 'CPUUtilization' metric in RDS console.
Why it's wrong here
Enhanced Monitoring provides additional OS-level metrics via the RDS agent, but the RDS console does not support creating or managing CloudWatch alarms. The standard 'CPUUtilization' metric is already emitted by RDS to CloudWatch, so you would create the alarm in the CloudWatch console or via the PutMetricAlarm API. Using Enhanced Monitoring for a simple CPU alarm is unnecessary and requires routing its log stream, not an alarm in the RDS console.
- ✓
Create a CloudWatch alarm on the 'CPUUtilization' metric with a threshold of 80% and an SNS topic for notifications.
Why this is correct
This is the standard method because Amazon RDS automatically publishes the 'CPUUtilization' metric in the AWS/RDS namespace to CloudWatch at one-minute or five-minute granularity. Creating a CloudWatch alarm with an 80% threshold and an SNS topic allows you to be notified via email, SMS, or Lambda when the alarm triggers. You should also set an appropriate evaluation period and period to avoid false alarms from temporary spikes.
- ✗
Enable CloudTrail and create a metric filter for CPU utilization.
Why it's wrong here
CloudTrail is an auditing service that records API calls and account activity, not CPU utilization telemetry. Metric filters operate on CloudWatch Logs and extract patterns from log events; they cannot convert CloudTrail's API history into a CPU performance metric. Because CPUUtilization is a performance metric published by RDS, CloudTrail has no relevant data to feed into such an alarm.
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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.