SOA-C02 Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation Practice Question
Which TWO AWS services can be used to monitor the performance of an Amazon RDS database and set alarms based on metrics?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse AWS CloudTrail (audit logging) with CloudWatch (monitoring), or think Lambda can be used for monitoring when it is actually a compute trigger, not a monitoring service.
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
✓
Amazon RDS Performance Insights
Amazon CloudWatch (Option D) is the primary monitoring service for AWS resources, including Amazon RDS. It collects metrics like CPU utilization, database connections, and read/write latency, and allows you to set CloudWatch Alarms that trigger actions (e.g., SNS notifications) when thresholds are breached. Amazon RDS Performance Insights (Option B) provides deeper database performance analysis by visualizing database load and identifying bottlenecks, and it can also publish metrics to CloudWatch for alarm purposes.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
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AWS Lambda
Why it's wrong here
AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that executes code in response to events; it does not provide any built-in performance monitoring or database analysis. While you could deploy a Lambda function to process or act on metrics, Lambda itself has no native dashboards, metrics, or RDS-specific performance insights. Therefore it cannot directly monitor database performance and is not a correct answer here.
- ✓
Amazon RDS Performance Insights
Why this is correct
Amazon RDS Performance Insights is a database performance tuning and monitoring feature that gives you a visual dashboard of the database load, wait states, and top SQL statements. It helps you quickly identify bottlenecks such as CPU, memory, or lock contention and can publish metrics to Amazon CloudWatch for threshold-based alarms. This makes it a purpose-built service for monitoring the performance of an RDS instance, so it is a correct answer.
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Amazon S3
Why it's wrong here
Amazon S3 is an object storage service designed to store and retrieve any amount of data, not a service for monitoring performance. Although you could configure S3 to receive database logs or export CloudWatch metrics to it, S3 itself offers no performance metrics, alarms, or database visibility. Thus it is incorrect because it does not independently monitor RDS performance.
- ✓
Amazon CloudWatch
Why this is correct
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service that tracks metrics, collects logs, and triggers alarms based on thresholds. For RDS, CloudWatch provides standard metrics such as CPU utilization, database connections, free storage space, and read/write IOPS, allowing you to detect performance degradation. It is a core monitoring service and is one of the correct answers.
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AWS CloudTrail
Why it's wrong here
AWS CloudTrail is an auditing and governance service that records API calls made by users and services in your AWS account. It provides a history of actions taken, such as 'ModifyDBInstance' or 'CreateDBInstance', but it does not capture runtime performance metrics like CPU, memory, or query latency. Therefore it is incorrect because it is not a performance monitoring tool.
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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.