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CLF-C02 Practice Question 68: Metric Threshold Alerts

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) · Test 7 · question 8 of 10

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An operations team wants to receive an email automatically whenever the average CPU utilization of a production Amazon EC2 instance stays above 80% for 15 minutes. What should the team set up?

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Answer:

  • B. An Amazon CloudWatch alarm that notifies an Amazon SNS topic

An Amazon CloudWatch metric alarm watches a metric, such as an EC2 instance's CPU utilization, and takes action when the value stays past a threshold for a set number of time periods. Actions include sending a notification to an Amazon SNS topic (which can deliver email), performing an EC2 action, or running an Auto Scaling action. Setting the alarm to average CPU above 80% for three 5-minute periods, with an SNS topic that has the team's email subscribed, meets the requirement.

Option A, CloudTrail, records *API calls*, meaning who did what in the account. It does not track how busy an instance's processor is. Option C, AWS Config, evaluates whether a resource's *configuration* follows rules, for example an approved instance type. It does not monitor performance metrics. Option D, AWS Budgets, alerts on *cost and usage* against a budget amount, not on an instance's CPU utilization minute by minute.

Reference: Using Amazon CloudWatch alarms

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