Question 1mediummultiple choice
Full question →mediummultiple choiceObjective-mapped
A web application publishes a custom metric 'FailedLoginAttempts' to Amazon CloudWatch. The SysOps administrator needs to be notified via Amazon SNS when the number of failed login attempts exceeds 100 within a 5-minute period. Which AWS service or feature should be used to create this notification?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Good practice is not just finding the correct option. The wrong answers often show the exact trap the exam wants you to fall into.
A
Distractor review
Amazon CloudWatch Logs metric filter
A metric filter would be used if the failed login data were in log files. In this scenario, the metric is already published as a CloudWatch metric, so no metric filter is needed.
B
Best answer
Amazon CloudWatch alarm
A CloudWatch alarm can monitor any CloudWatch metric (including custom ones) and trigger an action, such as sending a message to an SNS topic, when the metric crosses a defined threshold.
C
Distractor review
Amazon CloudWatch dashboard
A CloudWatch dashboard provides a visual representation of metrics but does not have built-in alerting capabilities. It cannot trigger SNS notifications.
D
Distractor review
AWS Config rule
AWS Config rules evaluate the configuration of AWS resources against desired policies, not real-time metric values. They are not designed for monitoring application-level metrics.
Common exam trap
Common exam trap: NAT rules depend on direction and matching traffic
NAT is not only about the public address. The inside/outside interface roles and the ACL or rule that matches traffic are just as important.
Technical deep dive
How to think about this question
NAT questions usually test address translation, overload/PAT behaviour, static mappings and whether the right traffic is being translated. Read the interface direction and address terms carefully.
KKey Concepts to Remember
- Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
- PAT allows many inside hosts to share one public address using ports.
- Inside local and inside global describe the private and translated addresses.
- NAT ACLs identify traffic for translation, not always security filtering.
TExam Day Tips
- Identify inside and outside interfaces first.
- Check whether the scenario needs static NAT, dynamic NAT or PAT.
- Do not confuse NAT matching ACLs with normal packet-filtering intent.
Related practice questions
Related SOA-C02 practice-question pages
Use these pages to review the topic behind this question. This is how one missed question becomes focused revision.
More questions from this exam
Keep practising from the same exam bank, or move into a focused topic page if this question exposed a weak area.
Question 1
A company uses Amazon CloudFront to deliver content to a global audience. The origin is an Application Load Balancer in us-east-1. The SysOps administrator wants to reduce costs by minimizing the number of requests that reach the origin server. Which action should the administrator take?
Question 2
A company runs a batch processing application on Amazon EC2 that runs for 2 hours every night. The workload can tolerate interruptions. Which EC2 purchasing option provides the lowest cost for this use case?
Question 3
A SysOps administrator needs to monitor the CPU utilization of an Amazon RDS DB instance and receive an alarm when CPU utilization exceeds 80% for 5 consecutive minutes. Which AWS service should be used to create this alarm?
Question 4
A company runs a critical web application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application uses session stickiness (sticky sessions) to maintain user sessions. The SysOps administrator notices that when instances are replaced during a scale-in or failure event, users lose their session data. The administrator needs to preserve session data across instance failures without losing stickiness benefits. What should the administrator do?
Question 5
A company runs a production web application on a single Amazon EC2 instance. The application experiences a predictable and steady workload 24/7. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize compute costs for this instance while ensuring it remains available during the expected workload. Which EC2 purchasing option should the administrator use?
Question 6
A company has a VPC with public and private subnets. The private subnets host application servers that need to make outbound HTTPS connections to the internet. The SysOps administrator must implement a solution that provides outbound internet connectivity while preventing inbound connections from the internet. Additionally, the solution must allow the company to control which domains the application servers can access. Which solution should the administrator implement?
FAQ
Questions learners often ask
What does this SOA-C02 question test?
Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Amazon CloudWatch alarm — To trigger an SNS notification based on a CloudWatch metric threshold, you create a CloudWatch alarm. The alarm can be set to monitor the 'FailedLoginAttempts' metric, with a statistic (e.g., Sum) over a period of 5 minutes, and a threshold of >100. When the alarm state changes to ALARM, it can publish to an SNS topic. Metric filters on log groups are used to extract metrics from logs, but here the metric is already being published. CloudWatch Logs is not needed. Dashboards are for visualization, not alerting. Config rules evaluate resource configurations, not custom metrics.
What should I do if I get this SOA-C02 question wrong?
Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.
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