This SOA-C02 practice question tests your understanding of monitoring, logging, and remediation. The scenario asks you to isolate a root cause — eliminate options that address a different problem before choosing. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
A SysOps administrator wants to receive a notification when an EC2 instance's status check fails. Which AWS service should be used to achieve this?
Amazon CloudWatch Alarms
CloudWatch can monitor StatusCheckFailed metric and trigger an alarm.
AWS Config
Why wrong: Config evaluates resource configurations.
AWS CloudTrail
Why wrong: CloudTrail logs API activity.
AWS Trusted Advisor
Why wrong: Trusted Advisor provides recommendations.
Answer choices
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 can monitor EC2 instance status checks (both system and instance checks) and trigger an action, such as sending a notification via Amazon SNS, when a status check fails. This is the native AWS service designed for real-time monitoring and alerting on metric thresholds, making it the correct choice for this use case.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
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
CloudWatch can monitor StatusCheckFailed metric and trigger an alarm.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
AWS Config
Why it's wrong here
Config evaluates resource configurations.
AWS CloudTrail
Why it's wrong here
CloudTrail logs API activity.
AWS Trusted Advisor
Why it's wrong here
Trusted Advisor provides recommendations.
Common exam traps
The trap here is that candidates often confuse AWS Config (which evaluates configuration compliance) with CloudWatch Alarms (which monitor metric thresholds), leading them to select AWS Config for real-time health alerts instead of the correct monitoring service.
Detailed technical explanation
EC2 status checks are performed every minute by the hypervisor (system status check) and the instance OS (instance status check), and the results are published as CloudWatch metrics (StatusCheckFailed, StatusCheckFailed_System, StatusCheckFailed_Instance). A CloudWatch Alarm can be configured with a threshold of >= 1 for one or more consecutive periods (e.g., 1 out of 1 datapoints) to trigger an SNS notification, enabling automated remediation via Lambda or Auto Scaling actions. In a production environment, this is critical for detecting hardware degradation or OS-level issues before they cause application downtime.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
A cloud solutions architect for a retail company is evaluating services for a new workload. The correct answer here reflects best practice for the specific scenario described — not a general cloud recommendation. Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option. Cloud exam questions reward reading the constraint carefully: the same technology can be right or wrong depending on the use case.
What to study next
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
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FAQ
Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation — This question tests Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
The correct answer is: Amazon CloudWatch Alarms — Amazon CloudWatch Alarms can monitor EC2 instance status checks (both system and instance checks) and trigger an action, such as sending a notification via Amazon SNS, when a status check fails. This is the native AWS service designed for real-time monitoring and alerting on metric thresholds, making it the correct choice for this use case.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Last reviewed: Jun 24, 2026
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.
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