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 set up this monitoring and alerting?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse AWS CloudTrail (auditing API calls) or AWS Config (configuration compliance) with CloudWatch, thinking they can monitor performance metrics, but only CloudWatch provides metric collection and alarm-based alerting for EC2 CPU utilization.
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
Amazon CloudWatch is the correct service because it provides the ability to monitor EC2 instance metrics, such as CPU utilization, and create CloudWatch Alarms that trigger when a metric crosses a defined threshold (e.g., 80%) for a specified number of consecutive evaluation periods (e.g., 10 minutes with a 1-minute period). This directly meets the requirement for monitoring and alerting on CPU utilization.
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 this is correct
Amazon CloudWatch is the native monitoring service that collects and tracks metrics from EC2 instances, including the CPUUtilization metric. It supports both default 5-minute and detailed 1-minute monitoring, and you can create CloudWatch Alarms that trigger actions when CPU utilization crosses a defined threshold, enabling proactive remediation.
- ✗
AWS Trusted Advisor
Why it's wrong here
AWS Trusted Advisor is an advisory service that inspects your AWS environment and provides recommendations for optimizing cost, performance, security, and fault tolerance, as well as service limit checks. It does not ingest real-time performance metrics such as CPU utilization; it performs periodic audits against AWS best practices rather than continuous metric monitoring.
- ✗
AWS Config
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config is a configuration management service that records resource configuration changes and evaluates them against compliance rules. It captures the state and relationships of AWS resources over time, but it does not collect or expose system-level performance metrics like CPU utilization, so it cannot be used to monitor real-time resource usage or trigger metric-based alarms.
- ✗
AWS CloudTrail
Why it's wrong here
AWS CloudTrail is an auditing service that records API activity in your AWS account, capturing details about who made calls, when, and from which IP address. It focuses on governance and security by logging management events, not on system performance metrics such as CPU utilization, which are outside its scope as telemetry.
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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.