CV0-004 Operations and Support Practice Question
A cloud operations team is responsible for a multi-tier application on AWS. They need to improve observability by correlating metrics, logs, and traces to diagnose performance issues across services. The team wants to use AWS services that natively support this correlation. Which TWO actions should the team take? (Choose two.)
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is equating auditing services such as CloudTrail and Config with observability, when they record API activity and configuration state rather than performance telemetry.
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
✓
Publish custom application metrics to Amazon CloudWatch using the PutMetricData API
Correlating metrics, logs, and traces for performance diagnosis requires instrumenting the application with X-Ray for distributed tracing and publishing custom application metrics to CloudWatch. Together, traces and metrics can be related to log data to isolate latency and errors across services. S3 versioning, CloudTrail data events, and Config rules address storage durability, API auditing, and compliance, not observability correlation.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Publish custom application metrics to Amazon CloudWatch using the PutMetricData API
Why this is correct
Publishing custom metrics with PutMetricData lets the team record application-specific measurements alongside standard metrics in CloudWatch. These metrics can be visualized and alarmed on, and they can be correlated with logs and traces to build a fuller picture of application behavior, which directly supports the observability requirement.
- ✗
Configure AWS Config rules to evaluate resource compliance on a schedule
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config rules assess whether resources comply with desired configurations, which supports governance and compliance rather than performance observability. Config does not collect application traces or custom metrics and does not provide the cross-service correlation needed to diagnose performance issues, so it is not an appropriate action for this scenario.
- ✓
Instrument the application with AWS X-Ray SDKs and enable X-Ray tracing on the services
Why this is correct
Instrumenting the application with X-Ray SDKs and enabling tracing allows the team to capture end-to-end traces that show how requests flow across services and where latency occurs. X-Ray integrates with services such as API Gateway, Lambda, and ECS, and the traces can be correlated with other telemetry, supporting the observability goal.
- ✗
Enable AWS CloudTrail data events for all S3 buckets in the account
Why it's wrong here
CloudTrail data events record object-level API activity on S3, such as GetObject and PutObject, which is useful for auditing and security analysis. However, they capture control-plane and data-plane API calls, not application performance telemetry, and they do not correlate with CloudWatch metrics or X-Ray traces for diagnosing latency.
- ✗
Store all application logs in an Amazon S3 bucket with versioning enabled
Why it's wrong here
S3 with versioning is durable storage for objects but does not provide query, correlation, or metric capabilities. Logs stored there would not be natively correlated with CloudWatch metrics or X-Ray traces, and versioning addresses object overwrite protection rather than observability, so this action does not meet the team's goal.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
Go deeper
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Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official CompTIA exam blueprint
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