SOA-C02 Cost and Performance Optimization Practice Question
A SysOps administrator wants to receive alerts when the estimated charges for an AWS account exceed a certain threshold. Which AWS service should be used?
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
✓
AWS Budgets
AWS Budgets enables you to set custom cost and usage budgets and receive alerts when your actual or forecasted costs exceed your budget thresholds. This is the correct service for receiving alerts on estimated charges. Option A (AWS Trusted Advisor) provides cost optimization recommendations but does not send billing alerts. Option B (AWS Cost Explorer) allows you to analyze your costs but does not send proactive alerts. Option C (Amazon CloudWatch billing metric) does have billing metrics, but to set alerts on those metrics you must use AWS Budgets; CloudWatch itself is not the service for budget alerts.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
AWS Trusted Advisor
Why it's wrong here
AWS Trusted Advisor provides cost optimization checks such as identifying idle and underutilized resources, but it does not monitor your estimated monthly bill or send proactive budget alerts. It is a best-practice assessment tool, not a billing alerting service. Therefore, it is incorrect for receiving alerts when estimated charges approach a specified threshold.
- ✗
AWS Cost Explorer
Why it's wrong here
AWS Cost Explorer offers interactive charts and forecasts to help you visualize historical and projected spending, but it does not generate notifications or alerts. You can view cost data and forecast trends, but to receive automated notifications when your spending exceeds a threshold, you must configure AWS Budgets. Thus, Cost Explorer alone cannot fulfill the requirement.
- ✗
Amazon CloudWatch (billing metric)
Why it's wrong here
CloudWatch does expose a billing metric, EstimatedCharges, if you enable billing metrics and then create an alarm, but this capability has limitations such as only covering the total estimated charges, not fine-grained budget components, and alerts are based on actual accrual rather than budget forecasting. AWS Budgets is the dedicated service for defining cost and usage thresholds and sending notifications when those thresholds are breached. Since the administrator wants budget-based alerts, AWS Budgets is the correct service, even though billing metric alarms exist.
- ✓
AWS Budgets
Why this is correct
AWS Budgets is the native service for creating cost, usage, and reservation budgets and for sending alerts when actual or forecasted spending exceeds defined thresholds. You can set multiple budget limits, filter by dimensions like service or linked account, and receive notifications via email or SNS. This meets the requirement to receive alerts when estimated charges reach a specified amount, making it the correct answer.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every SOA-C02 question from scratch — 1,169 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
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.