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.
An application is running on an EC2 instance and is experiencing intermittent connection timeouts. The SysOps administrator wants to capture network traffic to analyze the issue. Which AWS service should be used?
CloudWatch Logs
Why wrong: CloudWatch Logs captures application logs, not network traffic.
AWS CloudTrail
Why wrong: CloudTrail records API calls, not network traffic.
AWS Config
Why wrong: AWS Config records resource configurations.
VPC Flow Logs
VPC Flow Logs capture network traffic metadata.
Answer choices
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
VPC Flow Logs
VPC Flow Logs capture IP traffic information for network interfaces in a VPC, including accepted and rejected connection attempts. This allows the SysOps administrator to analyze the source/destination IPs, ports, protocols, and whether the traffic was allowed or denied, which is essential for diagnosing intermittent connection timeouts.
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.
CloudWatch Logs
Why it's wrong here
CloudWatch Logs captures application logs, not network traffic.
AWS CloudTrail
Why it's wrong here
CloudTrail records API calls, not network traffic.
AWS Config
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config records resource configurations.
VPC Flow Logs
Why this is correct
VPC Flow Logs capture network traffic metadata.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Common exam traps
The trap here is that candidates often confuse VPC Flow Logs (which capture network traffic metadata) with CloudWatch Logs (which capture application/system logs) or CloudTrail (which captures API activity), leading them to choose a logging service that cannot diagnose network-level issues.
Detailed technical explanation
VPC Flow Logs capture metadata about IP traffic at the network interface level, including fields such as source/destination IP, port, protocol (e.g., TCP, UDP), and the action (ACCEPT/REJECT). They are published to CloudWatch Logs or Amazon S3, and can be analyzed using Athena or third-party tools. A subtle behavior is that flow logs do not capture traffic to or from Amazon DNS servers (169.254.169.253) or the Amazon-provided DHCP server (169.254.169.254) by default, which can sometimes mask DNS-related timeouts.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
A healthcare organisation deploys an application with a public-facing web tier and a private database tier. The database subnet has no public IP and only accepts connections from the web tier's security group. Questions like this test whether you can design cloud network isolation using VNets/VPCs, subnets, and security group rules.
What to study next
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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: VPC Flow Logs — VPC Flow Logs capture IP traffic information for network interfaces in a VPC, including accepted and rejected connection attempts. This allows the SysOps administrator to analyze the source/destination IPs, ports, protocols, and whether the traffic was allowed or denied, which is essential for diagnosing intermittent connection timeouts.
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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