SOA-C02 Networking and Content Delivery Practice Question
A SysOps administrator notices that traffic from an Application Load Balancer to targets is failing intermittently. The targets are EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The health check settings on the target group are: ping path '/health', healthy threshold 2, unhealthy threshold 2, timeout 5 seconds, interval 30 seconds. Which change would most likely improve the stability of the health checks?
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
✓
Increase the unhealthy threshold to 5.
Increasing the unhealthy threshold reduces flapping; currently 2 consecutive failures mark an instance unhealthy, which may be too sensitive. Option A is wrong because a longer interval would delay detection. Option B is wrong because a shorter timeout may cause false positives. Option C is wrong because decreasing healthy threshold increases sensitivity.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the interval to 60 seconds.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing the interval to 60 seconds makes health checks less frequent, so the load balancer takes longer to notice a genuinely failed instance. This does not change the number of failures required to mark an instance unhealthy, so it does not prevent flapping caused by transient failures; it only delays detection and can leave traffic routed to dead instances for longer.
- ✗
Decrease the healthy threshold to 1.
Why it's wrong here
Setting the healthy threshold to 1 means a single successful health check immediately changes the instance state from unhealthy to healthy. This makes the system extremely sensitive to intermittent successes, causing the instance to flap rapidly between healthy and unhealthy states, which forces the load balancer to frequently alter its routing and can disrupt ongoing requests.
- ✗
Decrease the timeout to 2 seconds.
Why it's wrong here
Decreasing the timeout to 2 seconds gives the health check endpoint less time to respond, so any normal latency spike—such as a brief CPU burst or a slow database query—can cause the check to fail. This increases false positive failures, making instances appear unhealthy even when they are operational, which in turn causes more flapping and unnecessary instance replacement.
- ✓
Increase the unhealthy threshold to 5.
Why this is correct
Increasing the unhealthy threshold to 5 requires five consecutive failed health checks before an instance is declared unhealthy, rather than immediately reacting to a single failure. This adds tolerance for short-lived network glitches or transient resource bottlenecks, filtering out spurious failures and significantly reducing flapping while still allowing the load balancer to eventually remove a truly unhealthy instance.
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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.