SAP-C03 practice question: Cost reporting, budgets and anomaly detection
Cost-Optimized Architecture Design A free question from our original SAP-C03 practice exam. Try it, then open the answer to see why each option is right or wrong.
A retailer's finance team wants to know before the month ends when account spend is likely to pass its approved budget, and it wants to hear about sudden unexplained spikes the same day, not at the end of the billing period.
The spend comes from several accounts, and the team wants the alerts delivered to an email list through a managed notification service, with no servers to run.
Which solution meets these requirements?
Choose one answer.
AA. Open Cost Explorer once a week, filter by account, and compare the month-to-date total with the approved budget in a shared spreadsheet.
BB. Create an AWS Budgets forecasted-spend alert for the approved amount and a Cost Anomaly Detection monitor with individual alerts, both sent to an SNS topic that emails the finance list.
CC. Export the Cost and Usage Report to Amazon S3 each day, and run an Amazon Athena query by hand whenever someone wants to compare the month-to-date spend against the approved budget for the month.
DD. Write a Lambda function that runs every hour, reads the account's spend from the Cost Explorer API, and posts the total to a chat channel.
Show the answer and explanation
Answer: B
A. Wrong: Weekly manual checks do not warn before the month ends or flag a spike on the day it happens. The spreadsheet is also a manual process.
B. Right: Correct. The budget alert fires on the forecast before the limit is reached, and the anomaly monitor flags unusual spend on the day it happens. SNS delivers both to the email list without any servers to run.
C. Wrong: The report and the query give the data, but nothing alerts the finance team before the limit or on a spike. The team would still check it by hand.
D. Wrong: The function can work, but the team would build and maintain the polling and the alert logic itself. Budgets and anomaly detection provide these alerts as managed features.
Explanation
Budgets forecast alerts warn before the limit, and Cost Anomaly Detection flags unusual spikes, with SNS delivering both to email. Manual checks, a hand-run query and a custom polling function each miss the early warning or add work.
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