AWS Health events and notifications: DOP-C02 study notes and practice questions
What to know about AWS Health events and notifications for the DOP-C02 exam, from the Incident and Event Response domain (14% of the exam guide), then 1 free question to test it. Part of the DOP-C02 study guide.
Health questions ask how to learn quickly about AWS issues or maintenance that affect your resources, across many accounts, and act automatically.
What AWS Health provides
Account-specific events about your resources: service issues, scheduled changes (such as EC2 instance retirement or RDS maintenance), and account notifications (such as expiring certificates or IAM key exposure).
The AWS Health Dashboard in the console and the Health API (with a Business, Enterprise On-Ramp or Enterprise Support plan, or their replacements).
Public events about Regional service status on the public dashboard.
Organizational view
Turn on the organizational view to see events from all member accounts in one place.
Register a delegated administrator account so the security or operations team doesn’t use the management account.
Automating responses
Health events arrive in EventBridge (source aws.health), so rules can:
Notify teams through SNS or chat.
Start Systems Manager Automation, such as stopping and starting an instance scheduled for retirement to move it to new hardware.
Create OpsItems.
Run Lambda to rotate an exposed access key.
Send events from member accounts to a central event bus for a single view.
Other notification paths
AWS User Notifications configures notifications for Health and other events in one place.
AWS Trusted Advisor checks for cost, security, limits and resilience issues, also with EventBridge events.
Designing for it
Health tells you what AWS is doing; your own CloudWatch alarms still tell you how your app is behaving. Use both.
Common traps
Checking the dashboard by hand for scheduled events.
Looking in each account separately instead of using the organizational view.
Using the management account for daily operations instead of a delegated administrator.
An airline runs about 200 AWS accounts through AWS Organizations. The operations team needs to know about AWS Health events that affect its resources, such as scheduled maintenance for EC2 instances or an issue with a service in a Region the airline uses.
Notifications should reach the operations team's SNS topic in the central account, and they should cover every member account without an extra setup in each account. The team wants to act on the events automatically when it can.
Which approach meets these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?
Choose one answer.
AA. Enable the AWS Health organizational view through a delegated administrator, and create a central EventBridge rule that matches Health events and sends them to SNS or Lambda.
BB. Create an EventBridge rule in each of the 200 accounts that matches AWS Health events and sends them to a local SNS topic, and subscribe the operations team to each topic.
CC. Check the AWS Health Dashboard each morning in every account, and open a ticket in the operations queue for any event that affects the airline's resources.
DD. Create an AWS Config rule that marks resources as noncompliant when AWS Health reports an issue, and send the compliance changes to the SNS topic.
C. Wrong: Checking dashboards by hand is slow and easy to miss, and it does not route events to the SNS topic or allow automatic action. The team wanted events delivered to it. Learn more: What is AWS Health? (opens in a new tab)
The AWS Health organizational view, run through a delegated administrator, gives the central account events from every member account. An EventBridge rule can route those events to SNS for people or to Lambda for automatic action, with no setup in each account. Per-account rules, dashboard checks and Config rules each add work or miss the events.
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