SOA-C02 Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation Practice Question
A SysOps administrator notices that an EC2 instance's CPU utilization has been at 100% for the past hour. The administrator checks CloudWatch metrics and sees no anomalies in network or disk I/O. Which step should the administrator take to investigate further?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates assume CPU credit balance (Option B) is always the answer for high CPU utilization, but credits only apply to T-series instances, and the question does not specify the instance type, making detailed monitoring the more universally correct first step for investigation.
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
✓
Enable detailed monitoring on the EC2 instance to get 1-minute CloudWatch metrics.
Detailed monitoring (1-minute metrics) provides higher-resolution data than the default 5-minute metrics, allowing the administrator to identify short-lived CPU spikes or patterns that might be averaged out in the standard 5-minute interval. Since network and disk I/O appear normal, the issue is likely a process or application consuming CPU, and finer-grained metrics help pinpoint the timing and correlate with specific events or logs.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Install the CloudWatch Logs agent on the instance to capture system logs.
Why it's wrong here
Installing the CloudWatch Logs agent configures log collection (e.g., system logs, application logs) but does not capture CPU utilization or other performance metrics. Even if the agent is the unified CloudWatch agent that can collect custom metrics, simply installing it without configuring the metric collection portion will not provide the CPU utilization data needed to diagnose a spike. System logs might reveal a misbehaving application, but they do not give the continuous, high-resolution CPU time-series that an EC2 CPU utilization problem requires.
- ✗
Check the EC2 instance's CPU credit balance in CloudWatch.
Why it's wrong here
CPU credit balance is a metric specific to burstable instance types (T2/T3/T4g) that tracks how many CPU credits the instance has accrued; it does not indicate why a non-burstable instance is experiencing high CPU load. Even on burstable instances, a low credit balance would explain performance throttling, but it does not identify the workload or process consuming CPU. Since the scenario is about high CPU utilization, not credit exhaustion, checking this metric does not provide the diagnostic insight needed to resolve the problem.
- ✗
Stop the EC2 instance and start it again to reset the CPU.
Why it's wrong here
Stopping and starting an EC2 instance migrates it to a new underlying host but does not alter the root cause of high CPU, such as a runaway process, memory leak, or a misconfigured application. This action only provides temporary relief if the issue is transient and carries risks, including losing data on instance store volumes and incurring downtime. It is a remedial action, not a diagnostic one, and it fails to generate any CloudWatch metrics or logs that would help identify why CPU utilization is high.
- ✓
Enable detailed monitoring on the EC2 instance to get 1-minute CloudWatch metrics.
Why this is correct
Enabling detailed monitoring on the EC2 instance changes the CloudWatch metric delivery interval from the default 5 minutes to 1 minute, giving a much finer-grained view of CPU utilization. With 1-minute data, you can correlate CPU spikes with specific events such as cron jobs, deployment windows, or traffic surges, making it much easier to pinpoint the cause. This is the correct first step in a troubleshooting workflow because it collects the high-resolution performance data needed before any remediation.
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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.