CV0-004 Operations and Support Practice Question
A cloud administrator needs to monitor CPU utilization for a fleet of EC2 instances and receive notifications when utilization exceeds 80%. Which AWS service should be used to create a metric alarm that triggers an SNS notification?
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 CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch is the AWS service for monitoring metrics and creating alarms. CloudWatch Alarms can be configured to trigger SNS notifications when a metric crosses a threshold.
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 Config
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config records resource configuration changes and evaluates compliance rules; it does not ingest CloudWatch CPU metrics or trigger SNS on threshold breaches. It would be correct for detecting and remediating configuration drift, not for alerting when utilisation exceeds a percentage.
- ✗
AWS Trusted Advisor
Why it's wrong here
Trusted Advisor inspects accounts against best-practise checks and offers recommendations; it neither collects CPU metrics nor evaluates thresholds or publishes to SNS. It would be correct for identifying cost, security and fault-tolerance improvements, not for building a metric alarm on utilisation data.
- ✓
Amazon CloudWatch
Why this is correct
Amazon CloudWatch ingests EC2 hypervisor-level metrics, including CPUUtilization, without agents, and its alarms evaluate thresholds against configurable periods. An alarm set above 80% transitions to ALARM and invokes an SNS topic action, satisfying the notification requirement directly. CloudTrail records API activity, and Trusted Advisor offers recommendations, neither providing metric threshold alarms.
- ✗
AWS CloudTrail
Why it's wrong here
CloudTrail logs API activity for auditing and security analysis; it captures no performance metrics such as CPU utilisation and cannot publish threshold alarms to SNS. It would be correct for tracing who made which API call, not for monitoring instance resource consumption.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CV0-004 practice question is part of Courseiva's free CompTIA 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 CV0-004 exam.