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DVA-C02 · Question #262

A company deploys a photo-processing application to an Amazon EC2 instance. The application needs to process each photo in less than 5 seconds. If processing takes longer than 5 seconds, the…

The correct answer is A. Create an Amazon CloudWatch custom metric. Each time a photo is processed, publish the. Publishing a custom CloudWatch metric for processing time and creating an alarm with an SNS notification is the most operationally efficient way to measure latency and alert the team.

Submitted by tyler.j· Mar 5, 2026Monitoring and Troubleshooting

Question

A company deploys a photo-processing application to an Amazon EC2 instance. The application needs to process each photo in less than 5 seconds. If processing takes longer than 5 seconds, the company's development team must receive a notification. How can a developer implement the required time measurement and notification with the LEAST operational overhead?

Options

  • ACreate an Amazon CloudWatch custom metric. Each time a photo is processed, publish the
  • BCreate an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue. Each time a photo is
  • CCreate an Amazon CloudWatch custom metric. Each time a photo is processed, publish the
  • DCreate an Amazon Kinesis data stream. Each time a photo is processed, publish the processing

How the community answered

(22 responses)
  • A
    77% (17)
  • B
    14% (3)
  • C
    5% (1)
  • D
    5% (1)

Why each option

Publishing a custom CloudWatch metric for processing time and creating an alarm with an SNS notification is the most operationally efficient way to measure latency and alert the team.

ACreate an Amazon CloudWatch custom metric. Each time a photo is processed, publish theCorrect

The application publishes a custom CloudWatch metric (e.g., ProcessingTime in seconds) via the PutMetricData API each time a photo is processed. A CloudWatch alarm is then configured to trigger when the metric exceeds 5 seconds, sending a notification to an SNS topic that emails the development team, requiring no additional infrastructure.

BCreate an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue. Each time a photo is

Using SQS to store processing times and a Lambda to evaluate them and send SNS notifications adds unnecessary components and increases operational complexity compared to native CloudWatch metrics and alarms.

CCreate an Amazon CloudWatch custom metric. Each time a photo is processed, publish the

This option is a distractor variant of A; the correct answer A already includes both the metric publication and an SNS alarm notification, making C redundant or incorrectly described.

DCreate an Amazon Kinesis data stream. Each time a photo is processed, publish the processing

Kinesis Data Streams is designed for high-throughput real-time data streaming, not for simple threshold-based alerting. Using Kinesis for this use case introduces unnecessary cost and operational overhead.

Concept tested: CloudWatch custom metrics and alarms for application performance monitoring

Source: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/publishingMetrics.html

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