Exams / SOA-C03 / CloudWatch metrics, alarms and dashboards / Question 2
SOA-C03 practice question: CloudWatch metrics, alarms and dashboards (2 of 3)
Monitoring, Logging, Analysis, Remediation, and Performance Optimization A free question from our original SOA-C03 practice exam. Try it, then open the answer to see why each option is right or wrong.
A ski resort runs a nightly lift-pass reconciliation job on Amazon EC2. While it runs, the job publishes a custom CloudWatch metric, RecordsProcessed, every minute. If the job crashes, it stops publishing the metric completely. The operations team created an alarm on RecordsProcessed less than 1 for 5 consecutive periods, but when the job crashed last week the alarm stayed in INSUFFICIENT_DATA and nobody was notified. Which change makes the alarm notify the team when the job stops publishing?
Choose one answer.
- AA. Set the alarm's missing data treatment to notBreaching so that gaps in the metric are evaluated as normal data points.
- BB. Set the alarm's missing data treatment to ignore so that the alarm keeps its last state until new data arrives.
- CC. Set the alarm's missing data treatment to breaching so that every missing data point counts as below the threshold.
- DD. Increase the alarm period from 1 minute to 1 hour so that at least one data point is always present in each period.
Show the answer and explanation
Answer: C
Explanation
When a metric disappears, the alarm's TreatMissingData setting decides what happens. The default, missing, leads to INSUFFICIENT_DATA when all points are absent. For a heartbeat-style metric where silence means failure, breaching is the right choice, because it turns the absence of data into an alarm.
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