AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02)Cloud Technology and ServicesMedium
A DevOps engineer wants to be automatically notified via email whenever the average CPU utilization of an EC2 Auto Scaling group exceeds 80% for 5 consecutive minutes. Which AWS service combination should be configured to achieve this?
- AAmazon Inspector with a finding report
- BAWS Config with a compliance rule
- CAmazon CloudWatch Alarm integrated with Amazon SNS
- DAWS CloudTrail with an S3 event notification
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: C. Amazon CloudWatch Alarm integrated with Amazon SNS
Amazon CloudWatch collects metrics like CPU utilization and can trigger a CloudWatch Alarm when a threshold is breached over a defined period; the alarm can publish a notification to an Amazon SNS topic to send an email alert.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Amazon Inspector performs security assessments, not performance metric alerting.
- B. AWS Config tracks resource configuration compliance, not real-time performance thresholds.
- D. CloudTrail logs API activity for auditing, not performance metric monitoring.
CloudWatch Alarms + SNS
CloudWatch Alarms monitor metrics and change state when a threshold is breached, which can trigger an SNS notification (e.g., email) or an automated action.
- CloudWatch collects metrics (CPU, memory via agent, etc.)
- Alarms can trigger Auto Scaling actions or SNS notifications
- SNS delivers alerts via email, SMS, or other subscribers
Memory trick: Watch the metric, alarm when it's hot, shout via SNS.