A company needs to track spending in its AWS account. The company must receive a notification when current costs and forecasted costs exceed specific thresholds. Which solution will meet these…

Question

Options

• ACreate a new IAM role. Attach the AWSPurchaseOrdersServiceRolePolicy AWS managed policy
• BCreate an AWS Cost and Usage Report. Create an AWS Step Functions state machine that runs
• CCreate an AWS Cost and Usage Report. Separate the current costs and forecasted costs by
• DCreate a recurring cost budget in AWS Budgets. Create an alert for the actual cost. Create a

• A
  4% (1)
• B
  8% (2)
• C
  81% (21)
• D
  8% (2)

Explanation

AWS Budgets is the purpose-built, fully managed solution for this use case - it natively supports alerts for both actual (current) and forecasted costs against defined thresholds, with SNS or email notifications requiring no custom code or infrastructure. Option C (the AWS Budgets solution with separate alerts for actual and forecasted costs) requires only a few clicks in the console and zero ongoing maintenance, satisfying the "least operational overhead" constraint directly.

Why the distractors fail:

• A is wrong because AWSPurchaseOrdersServiceRolePolicy governs purchase order management, not cost alerting - it solves a completely different problem.
• B is wrong because using Cost and Usage Reports + Step Functions introduces significant operational overhead: you must build, deploy, and maintain a custom state machine pipeline to parse reports and trigger notifications.
• D (if it describes Cost and Usage Reports with a custom processing layer) similarly adds overhead versus the native Budgets alerting - CUR exports are powerful for analysis but overkill for simple threshold alerts.

Memory tip: Whenever an AWS exam question mentions "notify when costs exceed thresholds" with "least operational overhead," default to AWS Budgets - it's the only AWS-native service designed specifically to alert on both actual and forecasted spend without any custom automation.

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