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SAP-C02 Practice Question 68: Cost Anomaly Detection Alerts

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) · Test 7 · question 8 of 10

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A company's monthly AWS spend varies with seasonal traffic and steady growth. Last month a misconfigured job in one member account ran for several days and added an unexpected five-figure charge that nobody noticed until the invoice arrived. Finance wants alerts that use the company's usual spend patterns, so that normal seasonal increases do not cause false alarms, and wants the alert to point to the service, account and Region that caused the change. Alerts should go to an email list and an Amazon SNS topic.

Which solution meets these requirements?

Select one answer
Show answer and explanation

Answer:

  • D. Use AWS Cost Anomaly Detection with monitors and alert subscriptions that use email and an SNS topic

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection *"uses machine learning models to detect and alert on anomalous spend patterns in your deployed AWS services."* AWS notes that it can *"evaluate your spend patterns using machine learning methods to minimize false positive alerts,"* for example *"weekly or monthly seasonality and natural growth,"* and that you can *"investigate the root causes of the anomaly ... split across four dimensions: AWS service, AWS account, Region, or usage type."* Alerts can be delivered by email or to an Amazon SNS topic (option D).

- A is wrong because a fixed budget threshold cannot distinguish normal seasonal growth from an abnormal spike, so it either fires on ordinary peaks or misses a runaway job that stays under the threshold. - B is wrong because a weekly manual review is not an alert, and Trusted Advisor cost checks look for optimization opportunities rather than spend anomalies. - C is wrong because a billing alarm on estimated charges is also a static threshold. It gives no breakdown by service, account or Region.

Reference: Detecting unusual spend with AWS Cost Anomaly Detection

Practice Test 7 ›

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