AWS DevOps Monitoring and Logging 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A CloudWatch Alarm is in 'INSUFFICIENT_DATA' state. What does this indicate?
- The metric threshold has been exceeded
- Not enough data points have been received yet to evaluate the alarm condition (Correct answer)
- The metric has been deleted
- The alarm has been disabled by an IAM policy
Correct answer: Not enough data points have been received yet to evaluate the alarm condition
INSUFFICIENT_DATA means the alarm has not yet received enough metric data points within its evaluation period to determine whether the threshold is breached.
Question 2: Which AWS X-Ray feature allows developers to add business-specific key-value metadata to traces for filtering in the X-Ray console?
- Segments
- Sampling rules
- Annotations (Correct answer)
- Groups
Correct answer: Annotations
X-Ray Annotations are indexed key-value pairs attached to segments that can be used to filter and search traces in the X-Ray console.
Question 3: A team wants real-time alerting when a CodeBuild project fails. The solution should require the least custom code. Which is the best approach?
- Poll CodeBuild API every minute with a Lambda function
- Configure a CodeBuild notification rule targeting an SNS topic for FAILED state events (Correct answer)
- Parse CloudTrail logs with Athena and alert on failures
- Use CloudWatch Logs metric filter on CodeBuild output
Correct answer: Configure a CodeBuild notification rule targeting an SNS topic for FAILED state events
CodeBuild notification rules natively emit events for build state changes (including FAILED) to SNS or Chatbot with no custom code required.
Question 4: Which Kinesis service is best suited for continuously delivering CloudWatch Logs subscription data to Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift for analytics?
- Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
- Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose (Data Firehose) (Correct answer)
- Amazon Kinesis Video Streams
- Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK)
Correct answer: Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose (Data Firehose)
Kinesis Data Firehose (now Amazon Data Firehose) is a fully managed delivery service that buffers and automatically loads streaming data into S3, Redshift, and other destinations.
Question 5: A production deployment introduced a memory leak. The team wants to correlate the timing of the deployment event with rising memory utilization. Which combination of AWS services provides this correlation?
- CodePipeline history + CloudWatch custom metrics for memory + CloudWatch Dashboard annotations (Correct answer)
- CloudTrail API history + VPC Flow Logs + CloudWatch Logs Insights
- X-Ray trace timeline + CloudWatch Metrics Math
- Config timeline + AWS Inspector findings
Correct answer: CodePipeline history + CloudWatch custom metrics for memory + CloudWatch Dashboard annotations
CloudWatch Dashboard vertical annotations mark deployment events from CodePipeline, allowing visual correlation with rising custom memory metrics on the same timeline.
Question 6: A security audit requires that all S3 object-level access events in a specific bucket be logged and queryable. Which service and configuration achieves this with the least operational overhead?
- Enable S3 server access logging and query with Athena
- Enable CloudTrail data events for the S3 bucket and use CloudTrail Lake for queries (Correct answer)
- Enable VPC Flow Logs and filter for S3 traffic
- Enable CloudWatch detailed monitoring on the S3 bucket
Correct answer: Enable CloudTrail data events for the S3 bucket and use CloudTrail Lake for queries
CloudTrail data events capture S3 object-level API calls (GetObject, PutObject, DeleteObject), and CloudTrail Lake provides SQL-based querying without S3/Athena setup.
Question 7: When using AWS CloudWatch Synthetics canaries, what is the primary purpose in a CI/CD pipeline?
- To run load tests against new deployments before traffic shift
- To monitor API endpoints and UI workflows continuously and alert on failures after deployment (Correct answer)
- To analyze Lambda cold start performance during deployments
- To validate CloudFormation template syntax before deployment
Correct answer: To monitor API endpoints and UI workflows continuously and alert on failures after deployment
Synthetics canaries run scripted checks against endpoints and workflows on a schedule, providing post-deployment validation that real user paths still function correctly.
AWS DevOps Monitoring and Logging 5
A CloudWatch Alarm is in 'INSUFFICIENT_DATA' state.
What does this indicate?