SOA-C02 Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation Practice Question
A SysOps administrator needs to monitor the health of an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. The administrator wants to receive an alert when the database connection count exceeds a threshold of 500 for more than 5 minutes. Which AWS service should be used to create this alert?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse the service that evaluates metrics (CloudWatch) with the service that delivers notifications (SNS), leading them to select SNS because they think of alerts as notifications, but CloudWatch is the service that creates and evaluates the alarm based on the metric threshold.
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 can monitor RDS metrics such as DatabaseConnections and trigger an alarm when the value exceeds a threshold of 500 for a specified duration (e.g., 5 consecutive evaluation periods). CloudWatch alarms evaluate metric data against a defined threshold and can then publish to an SNS topic to send notifications.
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 AWS monitoring service that retrieves and stores metrics from RDS, including the DatabaseConnections metric. You can create a CloudWatch alarm that evaluates this metric every minute, and if it exceeds 500 concurrently for 5 consecutive minutes, the alarm transitions to ALARM state and can trigger SNS notifications or Auto Scaling actions. This makes CloudWatch the correct service for detecting and responding to database connection pressure.
- ✗
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Why it's wrong here
Amazon Simple Notification Service is a fully managed pub/sub message delivery service, not a monitoring or metrics service. It cannot sample RDS metrics, evaluate thresholds, or execute logic on its own. Its role is limited to receiving alarm notifications from CloudWatch and fanning them out to subscribers via email, SMS, Lambda, or HTTP endpoints. Using SNS alone would leave you blind to the actual connection count until someone manually checks.
- ✗
AWS CloudTrail
Why it's wrong here
AWS CloudTrail records a history of API calls made by users, roles, or AWS services, producing an auditable event log. It captures actions like CreateDBInstance or ModifyDBInstance, but it does not expose performance counters like DatabaseConnections from within a database. While CloudTrail can help forensically investigate who changed an RDS config, it cannot serve as a real-time health monitor for connection saturation.
- ✗
AWS Config
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config tracks changes to resource configuration over time and evaluates that configuration against managed or custom rules, such as checking whether RDS instances have deletion protection enabled. It is not designed to ingest numeric performance metrics or runtime operational health indicators like the number of active connections. Therefore, AWS Config could confirm the desired setup but cannot alarm on a connection spike.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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