The answer is AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR). This service is the correct choice because it delivers the most granular billing data in CSV or Parquet format, which can be directly queried by Amazon Athena through an integration with AWS Glue and Amazon QuickSight, enabling custom ad-hoc analysis on the full cost and usage dataset. On the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate SOA-C02 exam, this question tests your ability to distinguish between services that provide raw, queryable data versus pre-aggregated views or alerts—a common trap is confusing CUR with AWS Budgets or Cost Explorer, which offer summaries but not the raw data Athena requires. Remember the memory tip: CUR gives you the raw "ingredients" for Athena to cook with, while other tools only serve the finished "dish."
SOA-C02 Cost and Performance Optimization Practice Question
This SOA-C02 practice question tests your understanding of cost and performance optimization. Match the stated requirement to the specific cloud service, access model, or configuration option — many options are valid in isolation but not for this scenario. 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 company uses multiple AWS accounts and needs to generate a detailed cost and usage report that can be queried using Amazon Athena for custom analysis. Which AWS service should the administrator enable?
Why wrong: Cost Explorer provides visualization and filtering of cost data but does not export data in a format directly queryable by Athena for custom SQL analysis.
B
AWS Budgets
Why wrong: AWS Budgets allows you to set budgets and receive alerts. It does not generate detailed reports for Athena querying.
C
AWS Cost and Usage Reports
Correct. The Cost and Usage Reports can be delivered to an S3 bucket in CSV or Parquet format, and can be queried with Athena for granular analysis.
D
AWS Application Cost Profiler
Why wrong: This service helps track software product costs on AWS, not overall account usage across multiple accounts.
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
AWS Cost and Usage Reports
AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) is the correct service because it generates detailed cost and usage data in CSV or Parquet format, which can be directly queried using Amazon Athena via integration with AWS Glue and Amazon QuickSight. This enables custom analysis and ad-hoc queries on the full billing dataset, unlike other services that provide pre-aggregated views or alerts.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
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 Cost Explorer
Why it's wrong here
Cost Explorer provides visualization and filtering of cost data but does not export data in a format directly queryable by Athena for custom SQL analysis.
✗
AWS Budgets
Why it's wrong here
AWS Budgets allows you to set budgets and receive alerts. It does not generate detailed reports for Athena querying.
✓
AWS Cost and Usage Reports
Why this is correct
Correct. The Cost and Usage Reports can be delivered to an S3 bucket in CSV or Parquet format, and can be queried with Athena for granular analysis.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
AWS Application Cost Profiler
Why it's wrong here
This service helps track software product costs on AWS, not overall account usage across multiple accounts.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates confuse AWS Cost Explorer's interactive dashboard with the raw, queryable data format of CUR, assuming Cost Explorer can export data in a format suitable for Athena, when in fact it only provides CSV exports of aggregated views, not the full normalized dataset.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Under the hood, AWS Cost and Usage Reports delivers data to an S3 bucket in hourly or daily granularity, with columns like line_item_type, product_code, and usage_quantity. When combined with AWS Glue crawlers and Athena table definitions, CUR enables SQL-based queries across millions of billing records, supporting custom cost allocation tags and resource-level analysis. A real-world scenario is a multi-account organization using Athena to join CUR data with VPC flow logs for cost attribution per subnet.
KKey Concepts to Remember
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
TExam Day Tips
→Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
→Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
A startup's cloud architect reviews their monthly bill and notices costs are higher than expected for a long-running batch job. Switching from on-demand instances to Reserved Instances — or using Spot/Preemptible VMs — can reduce compute costs by up to 72 %. Questions like this test whether you understand the tradeoffs between commitment, flexibility, and cost across cloud pricing models.
What to study next
Got this wrong? Here's your next step.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Cost and Performance Optimization — This question tests Cost and Performance Optimization — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: AWS Cost and Usage Reports — AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) is the correct service because it generates detailed cost and usage data in CSV or Parquet format, which can be directly queried using Amazon Athena via integration with AWS Glue and Amazon QuickSight. This enables custom analysis and ad-hoc queries on the full billing dataset, unlike other services that provide pre-aggregated views or alerts.
What should I do if I get this SOA-C02 question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Question Discussion
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