SAP-C03 practice question: Metrics, logs, tracing and SLOs (CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry, Application Signals) (2 of 2)
Operational Excellence and Automation 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 payment processor's checkout service has a target that 99.9 percent of requests succeed and that 95 percent of them finish within 800 milliseconds, measured over a month. The on-call team wants to see how much of the monthly error budget is left and to be paged early when the service burns that budget too fast.
The team also wants a view of checkout from outside the company's network, so that it notices when customers cannot reach the service even while the internal metrics look healthy.
Which TWO approaches meet these requirements? (Choose two.)
Choose two answers.
AA. Define service level objectives in CloudWatch Application Signals for the checkout service, one for availability and one for latency, and create burn-rate alarms that notify the on-call team.
BB. Create CloudWatch alarms on the checkout service's CPU utilization and memory usage, and page the on-call team when either one stays above 80 percent for 10 minutes.
CC. Create a CloudWatch Synthetics canary that runs the checkout flow from several locations outside the company's network on a schedule, and alarm when a run fails or runs slowly.
DD. Search the checkout service's logs in CloudWatch Logs Insights each morning for HTTP 500 responses, and compare the count with the previous day.
EE. Create a Cost Anomaly Detection monitor on the checkout service's account, and alert the on-call team when the daily spend changes sharply.
Show the answer and explanation
Answers: A, C
A. Right: Correct. Application Signals tracks each objective against its target and shows the error budget left in the interval. Burn-rate alarms page the on-call team when the budget is being used up too fast.
B. Wrong: CPU and memory do not measure whether the requests succeed or finish in time, so the error budget cannot be tracked from them. The alarms also miss customer-facing failures.
C. Right: Correct. A canary calls the checkout flow from outside the network, so it catches the customer-facing failures that internal metrics miss. Its alarms add an external view of availability and latency.
D. Wrong: A morning search finds failures long after they start, and it does not show the budget left in the month. The option is a manual review rather than an early alert.
E. Wrong: Spend anomalies reflect cost, not service health or the error budget. The option does not measure requests or latency.
Explanation
Application Signals tracks the availability and latency objectives with error-budget burn alarms, and a Synthetics canary from outside the network catches customer-facing failures. CPU alarms, a morning log search and spend anomalies do not measure the objectives, the budget or the external view.
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