DVA-C02 Question #443: Real Exam Question with Answer & Explanation

Question

An ecommerce startup is preparing for an annual sales event. As the traffic to the company's application increases, the development team wants to be notified when the Amazon EC2 instance's CPU utilization exceeds 80%. Which solution will meet this requirement?

Options

• ACreate a custom Amazon CloudWatch alarm that sends a notification to an Amazon SNS topic
• BCreate a custom AWS CloudTrail alarm that sends a notification to an Amazon SNS topic when
• CCreate a cron job on the EC2 instance that invokes the --describe-instance-information command
• DCreate an AWS Lambda function that queries the AWS CloudTrail logs for the CPUUtilization

Explanation

Option A is correct because Amazon CloudWatch is the native AWS monitoring service that collects EC2 metrics - including CPUUtilization - and allows you to set threshold-based alarms that trigger SNS notifications, which can email or text the development team automatically.

Option B is wrong because AWS CloudTrail records API calls (who did what, when), not performance metrics - it has no concept of CPU utilization and cannot create metric alarms.

Option C is wrong because describe-instance-information is an AWS Systems Manager (SSM) command about instance metadata, not a CPU metric tool, and a cron job on the instance itself is an unreliable, manual approach that doesn't integrate with AWS alerting.

Option D is wrong because CloudTrail logs contain API activity, not resource utilization data - querying them with Lambda won't surface CPU metrics, and this approach lacks the real-time threshold alerting that CloudWatch provides natively.

Memory tip: Think "CloudWatch = Watch your Cloud resources" - whenever a question involves monitoring metrics or performance thresholds on AWS services, CloudWatch + SNS is the canonical pattern. CloudTrail is for auditing (who touched what), not monitoring (how is it performing).

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