SOA-C02 Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation Practice Question
A SysOps administrator wants to monitor the CPU utilization of an Amazon RDS instance and receive an alert if it exceeds 90% for 5 consecutive minutes. Which TWO AWS services are required to set up this monitoring? (Choose TWO.)
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse Enhanced Monitoring (which provides OS-level metrics) with the standard CloudWatch metrics (which already include CPU utilization), leading them to incorrectly select Enhanced Monitoring as a required service.
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 is the service that collects and stores metrics such as CPU utilization from RDS instances. Amazon CloudWatch Alarms allow you to set a threshold (e.g., CPU > 90%) and evaluate it over a specified period (e.g., 5 consecutive minutes) to trigger an action, such as sending a notification via 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.
- ✗
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Why it's wrong here
Amazon SNS is a pub/sub notification service that only delivers messages to subscribers such as email, SMS, or HTTP endpoints. It cannot query, retrieve, or evaluate RDS CPU utilization metrics on its own, nor does it have any built-in monitoring capabilities. SNS becomes relevant only after a CloudWatch alarm detects a threshold breach and publishes to a topic as an action, so it is not a monitoring tool itself.
- ✗
AWS Config
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config is a service that records resource configuration changes and assesses them against compliance rules, such as whether an RDS instance has deletion protection enabled. It does not ingest or process performance time-series data like CPU utilization, which is a metric, not a configuration item. Since CPU utilization is a continuous operational measurement rather than a discrete configuration state, AWS Config cannot be used to monitor it.
- ✗
Amazon RDS Enhanced Monitoring
Why it's wrong here
RDS Enhanced Monitoring provides OS-visible metrics, including process-level CPU usage, memory, and disk I/O, by sending those to CloudWatch Logs rather than as CloudWatch metrics. However, the standard RDS CPUUtilization metric is published automatically by the RDS service to CloudWatch at the instance level, and it is already available without enabling Enhanced Monitoring. Enhanced Monitoring is an optional add-on for deeper OS insights, so it is not required to satisfy this monitoring requirement.
- ✓
Amazon CloudWatch Alarms
Why this is correct
Amazon CloudWatch Alarms monitor a specified CloudWatch metric over a defined period and can trigger actions such as sending an SNS notification or performing an EC2 Auto Scaling action when a threshold is breached. To monitor RDS CPU utilization, you can create an alarm on the CPUUtilization metric with a threshold, comparison operator, and evaluation periods to alert when CPU usage exceeds a desired level. This directly fulfills the SysOps administrator's goal of being notified about CPU utilization.
- ✓
Amazon CloudWatch
Why this is correct
Amazon CloudWatch is the core metrics repository and monitoring service where RDS automatically publishes the CPUUtilization metric for each database instance. It provides dashboards, metric statistics, and APIs such as GetMetricData for viewing and analyzing this data over time. Without CloudWatch, neither metric collection nor visualization of CPU utilization for RDS would exist, making it the foundation for any CPU monitoring solution in AWS.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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