SOA-C02 Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation Practice Question
A SysOps administrator needs to send a notification when an EC2 instance's CPU utilization exceeds 90% for 5 consecutive minutes. Which AWS service should be used to create the alarm?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse Amazon EventBridge with CloudWatch Alarms, thinking EventBridge can directly evaluate metric thresholds, but EventBridge requires a CloudWatch Alarm to generate the event, and it cannot perform the metric evaluation itself.
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 are the correct service because they allow you to monitor a specific metric (e.g., EC2 CPUUtilization) and trigger an action when the metric crosses a defined threshold for a specified number of consecutive evaluation periods. In this case, you can create a CloudWatch alarm with a statistic of 'Average', a threshold of 90%, and set the 'Datapoints to Alarm' and 'Evaluation Periods' to 5 (with a period of 1 minute) to achieve the '5 consecutive minutes' requirement. The alarm can then send a notification via Amazon SNS.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
AWS Config
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config is a service that records and evaluates configurations of AWS resources against desired policies, such as compliance rules for resource types or tags. It does not analyze time-series metric data like CPU utilization or request counts, so it cannot detect breach of a numeric threshold. While Config can send notifications on configuration changes, it is not designed for metric-based alerting.
- ✓
Amazon CloudWatch Alarms
Why this is correct
Amazon CloudWatch Alarms are the native mechanism for monitoring a single metric or a metric math expression over a specified time period. When the metric breaches a defined threshold for consecutive periods, the alarm transitions to the ALARM state and can trigger an action, such as publishing to an SNS topic to send a notification. This directly fulfills the requirement to notify when a metric condition is met.
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AWS Trusted Advisor
Why it's wrong here
AWS Trusted Advisor performs automated checks that provide recommendations for cost optimization, performance, security, and fault tolerance based on AWS best practices. It does not ingest live metric data or allow users to define custom thresholds for alerting. Its checks are run periodically against your account's resource inventory, not against real-time operational metrics, so it cannot be used to send metric threshold notifications.
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Amazon EventBridge
Why it's wrong here
Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus that decouples event producers from consumers by routing events based on rules, but those events are discrete occurrences such as state changes or API calls, not continuous metric streams. To trigger off a metric threshold via EventBridge, you would first need a CloudWatch Alarm to generate an event, meaning EventBridge is not the primary service for metric monitoring. It is inappropriate as a direct replacement for a metric 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.