AWS SOA-C02 Practice Test

SOA-C02 practice test: what's covered

• SysOps Associate
• CloudWatch
• Systems Manager
• VPC
• Backup

Free SOA-C02 sample questions

1. A SysOps Administrator is configuring high-resolution custom metrics in Amazon CloudWatch for a critical application. The application publishes metrics every 10 seconds. How should the administrator configure the CloudWatch metric storage and alarm evaluation?

   • A. Publish the metric with a 1-second storage resolution and configure CloudWatch Alarm evaluation periods with high-resolution 10-second intervals.
   • B. Use standard-resolution metrics with 1-minute storage resolution and set alarm evaluation periods to 10 seconds.
   • C. Enable CloudWatch Logs Insights to convert log events into 10-second metrics automatically without high-resolution metrics.
   • D. Configure an Amazon SNS topic to directly aggregate 10-second metric streams before sending them to CloudWatch.
   Show answer

   Correct: A. Option A is correct because CloudWatch high-resolution custom metrics allow data storage at 1-second resolution and enable alarm evaluation periods as low as 10 seconds or 30 seconds. Option B is incorrect because standard-resolution metrics only support 1-minute granularity, so 10-second alarm evaluations cannot be performed. Option C is incorrect because CloudWatch Logs Insights is a log querying service and does not ingest or publish 10-second high-resolution metrics automatically. Option D is incorrect because Amazon SNS is a messaging service for notification delivery and cannot aggregate metric data points for CloudWatch.

2. A Cloud Engineer needs to filter application log group data in Amazon CloudWatch Logs to identify HTTP 500 error spikes and automatically trigger an alert. Which configuration meets this operational requirement with minimal complexity?

   • A. Create a CloudWatch Logs Metric Filter with a pattern matching '[..., status = 500, size]', then attach a CloudWatch Alarm to the resulting custom metric.
   • B. Deploy an AWS Lambda function subscribed to CloudWatch Logs to parse error lines and publish metrics to CloudWatch.
   • C. Configure Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to stream log events to S3 and run Athena queries on an hourly schedule.
   • D. Enable AWS CloudTrail data events for CloudWatch Logs and trigger an EventBridge rule when 500 status codes occur.
   Show answer

   Correct: A. Option A is correct because Metric Filters parse log data in CloudWatch Logs into numerical CloudWatch metrics, which can then directly drive CloudWatch Alarms natively without requiring custom code. Option B is incorrect because deploying custom Lambda code adds unnecessary management overhead when native Metric Filters exist. Option C is incorrect because streaming logs to Athena introduces latency and cost, failing the low-complexity real-time alerting goal. Option D is incorrect because CloudTrail audits AWS API activity rather than parsing application HTTP status logs.

3. A SysOps Administrator is tasked with monitoring operating system memory utilization and disk space usage on Linux EC2 instances. Which TWO actions must the administrator take? (Select TWO.)

   • A. Install and configure the CloudWatch Agent on each Linux EC2 instance.
   • B. Attach an IAM role with the CloudWatchAgentServerPolicy managed policy to each EC2 instance.
   • C. Enable AWS CloudTrail OS-level memory telemetry logging in the AWS Management Console.
   • D. Configure EC2 Detailed Monitoring from the Amazon EC2 console for 1-minute metric intervals.
   Show answer

   Correct: A and B. Options A and B are correct because memory and disk space metrics are operating system internal metrics not exposed to the hypervisor; installing the CloudWatch Agent and providing IAM permissions via CloudWatchAgentServerPolicy allows pushing these metrics to CloudWatch. Option C is incorrect because CloudTrail tracks AWS API control-plane actions, not guest OS memory or disk usage. Option D is incorrect because EC2 Detailed Monitoring only provides hypervisor-level metrics like CPU and basic network I/O at 1-minute intervals, not guest OS memory or disk usage.

4. An operations team experiences alert fatigue due to multiple redundant CloudWatch Alarms firing simultaneously during transient CPU utilization spikes. A SysOps Administrator needs to suppress dependent alerts when a primary server failure occurs. Which solution should be implemented?

   • A. Create a Composite Alarm in Amazon CloudWatch using boolean rule logic to aggregate multiple alarm states into a single notification.
   • B. Increase the CloudWatch metric evaluation period to 24 hours to smooth out transient spikes.
   • C. Configure an AWS Systems Manager State Manager association to disable alarms during high CPU utilization events.
   • D. Replace CloudWatch Alarms with AWS Config rules linked to Amazon EventBridge event patterns.
   Show answer

   Correct: A. Option A is correct because CloudWatch Composite Alarms combine multiple alarm states using rule expressions (AND, OR, NOT) to reduce alert noise and trigger actions only when specific combined conditions are met. Option B is incorrect because setting a 24-hour evaluation period makes alarms insensitive to timely operational outages. Option C is incorrect because disabling alarms during high CPU events prevents legitimate alerting when failures occur. Option D is incorrect because AWS Config tracks resource compliance configurations rather than real-time performance metrics.

5. A SysOps Administrator is designing a high-availability disaster recovery solution for an Amazon Aurora MySQL database. The company requires a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of under 1 minute and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of under 5 minutes across AWS Regions. Which solution meets these requirements?

   • A. Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with cross-region storage-based replication.
   • B. Configure automated daily snapshots of the Aurora cluster and copy snapshots to the secondary region.
   • C. Set up AWS Backup to run hourly cross-region backup jobs for the database cluster.
   • D. Create an AWS Lambda function triggered by EventBridge to perform mysqldump exports every 15 minutes.
   Show answer

   Correct: A. Option A is correct because Aurora Global Database uses dedicated infrastructure in the storage layer to replicate data across regions with latency typically under 1 second (RPO < 1 min) and allows region failover within minutes (RTO < 5 min). Option B is incorrect because daily snapshots result in an RPO of up to 24 hours. Option C is incorrect because hourly backup jobs give an RPO of 1 hour, breaching the 1-minute requirement. Option D is incorrect because mysqldump exports are slow, resource-intensive, and fail to meet the sub-minute RPO requirement.

Last updated: 2026-10-19

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