SOA-C02 Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation Practice Question
A SysOps administrator wants to receive a notification when an EC2 instance's status check fails. Which AWS service should the administrator use to set up an alarm based on the status check metric?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse EventBridge's ability to react to EC2 instance state changes (e.g., running, stopped) with the need to monitor a continuous metric like status check failures, which requires CloudWatch Alarms for threshold-based evaluation.
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 is the correct service because EC2 instance status checks are published as CloudWatch metrics (e.g., StatusCheckFailed, StatusCheckFailed_Instance, StatusCheckFailed_System). A CloudWatch Alarm can be configured to monitor these metrics and trigger an action, such as sending a notification via Amazon SNS, when the alarm state changes to ALARM. This directly meets the requirement to receive a notification when a status check fails.
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 Alarms
Why this is correct
Amazon CloudWatch Alarms is the correct service because EC2 publishes the `StatusCheckFailed` metric (a composite of `StatusCheckFailed_System` and `StatusCheckFailed_Instance`) to CloudWatch every minute. You can create a metric alarm that watches this value and transitions to ALARM when it exceeds a threshold (e.g., > 0 for consecutive periods), then publishes to an SNS topic to trigger an email or SMS notification. This is purpose-built for metric-based threshold monitoring, unlike event-driven services.
- ✗
Amazon EventBridge
Why it's wrong here
Amazon EventBridge is an event bus service that delivers real-time streams of AWS events, such as EC2 instance state changes or API calls, but it does not natively evaluate metric thresholds over time. While you could create a rule to react to a CloudWatch Alarm state change (e.g., when an alarm enters ALARM), that still requires an underlying CloudWatch alarm. EventBridge alone cannot monitor the `StatusCheckFailed` metric directly, making it the wrong primary choice for this requirement.
- ✗
AWS Config
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config evaluates resource compliance against rules but does not generate alarms from EC2 status check metrics; Amazon CloudWatch is the service that publishes the `StatusCheckFailed` metric and allows alarm-based notifications. Config is tempting because it monitors configuration changes and can trigger custom actions via AWS Lambda, which might appear to cover status failures, but it lacks native metric alarm functionality. Config would be correct for detecting when an EC2 instance’s security group rules deviate from a baseline policy.
- ✗
AWS Systems Manager
Why it's wrong here
AWS Systems Manager is an operations and management service for patching, automation, Run Command, inventory collection, and Parameter Store, not for monitoring metric thresholds. It has no built-in capability to consume or alarm on CloudWatch metrics such as `StatusCheckFailed`; you would need to build a custom integration to generate notifications from it. This makes it unsuitable for the stated need, which is direct metric-based alerting.
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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.