Monitoring and Logging Flashcards
7 cards from real AWS practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Monitoring and Logging flashcards as text
A CloudWatch Alarm is in 'INSUFFICIENT_DATA' state. What does this indicate?
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.
Which AWS X-Ray feature allows developers to add business-specific key-value metadata to traces for filtering in the X-Ray console?
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.
A team wants real-time alerting when a CodeBuild project fails. The solution should require the least custom code. Which is the best approach?
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.
Which Kinesis service is best suited for continuously delivering CloudWatch Logs subscription data to Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift for analytics?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
When using AWS CloudWatch Synthetics canaries, what is the primary purpose in a CI/CD pipeline?
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.