Quick Answer
The answer is AWS Budgets, AWS Cost Explorer, and AWS Trusted Advisor. These three services work together to provide a comprehensive approach to monitoring and optimizing costs in your AWS environment. AWS Budgets allows you to set custom spending thresholds and receive alerts when you approach or exceed them, while AWS Cost Explorer provides detailed visualizations and historical analysis of your usage and spending patterns. AWS Trusted Advisor then goes a step further by offering specific cost optimization recommendations, such as identifying idle load balancers or underutilized EC2 instances, directly from its cost optimization checks. On the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate SOA-C02 exam, this question tests your understanding of the core cost management toolkit, often appearing in scenarios where you must distinguish between monitoring tools (like CloudWatch, which tracks performance metrics) and cost-specific services. A common trap is confusing AWS Cost Explorer with AWS Budgets—remember that Budgets is for proactive alerts, while Explorer is for retrospective analysis. A helpful memory tip is to think of the three Cs: Control (Budgets), Check (Cost Explorer), and Cut (Trusted Advisor).
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.
Which THREE AWS services can be used to monitor and optimize costs? (Choose THREE.)
AWS Trusted Advisor
Provides cost optimization recommendations.
AWS Cost Explorer
Visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs.
AWS Budgets
Set custom budgets and receive alerts.
AWS Shield
Why wrong: DDoS protection service.
AWS CloudFormation
Why wrong: Infrastructure as code, not cost monitoring.
Answer choices
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
AWS Trusted Advisor
AWS Trusted Advisor provides cost optimization recommendations by analyzing your AWS environment and identifying idle resources, underutilized instances, and reserved instance opportunities. It offers specific checks like 'Low Utilization Amazon EC2 Instances' and 'Idle Load Balancers' that directly help reduce spending.
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.
AWS Trusted Advisor
Why this is correct
Provides cost optimization recommendations.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
AWS Cost Explorer
Why this is correct
Visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
AWS Budgets
Why this is correct
Set custom budgets and receive alerts.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
AWS Shield
Why it's wrong here
DDoS protection service.
AWS CloudFormation
Why it's wrong here
Infrastructure as code, not cost monitoring.
Common exam traps
The trap here is that candidates may confuse AWS Shield (a security service) with cost-related services due to its name similarity to 'Shield' implying protection, or assume CloudFormation's resource management includes cost tracking, but neither provides cost monitoring or optimization capabilities.
Detailed technical explanation
AWS Cost Explorer uses a data warehouse of your usage and cost data from AWS Cost and Usage Reports, allowing you to filter by service, region, or tag for granular analysis. AWS Budgets can trigger actions via Amazon SNS or AWS Lambda when costs exceed thresholds, enabling automated cost governance. Trusted Advisor's cost checks rely on CloudWatch metrics and instance metadata to detect patterns like CPU utilization below 10% over 14 days.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
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
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Cost and Performance Optimization — study guide chapter
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Cost and Performance Optimization practice questions
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FAQ
Cost and Performance Optimization — This question tests Cost and Performance Optimization — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
The correct answer is: AWS Trusted Advisor — AWS Trusted Advisor provides cost optimization recommendations by analyzing your AWS environment and identifying idle resources, underutilized instances, and reserved instance opportunities. It offers specific checks like 'Low Utilization Amazon EC2 Instances' and 'Idle Load Balancers' that directly help reduce spending.
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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Same concept, more angles
These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.
Variation 1. A company is using AWS CloudFormation to deploy infrastructure. They want to reduce costs by identifying unused resources. Which AWS service should they use to monitor and report on resource utilization and cost?
easyWhy A: Option D is correct because AWS Trusted Advisor provides cost optimization checks, including idle resources. Option A is wrong because AWS Config tracks configuration changes, not cost. Option B is wrong because CloudTrail logs API activity, not cost. Option C is wrong because CloudWatch monitors performance, not cost optimization.
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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