Alarms

5 minutes 5 Questions

Alarms provide the ability to trigger actions when a metric crosses a specified threshold or enters an abnormal state. This helps to monitor and manage the health of your resources and prevent potential issues by alerting or triggering the necessary actions, such as stopping or scaling an instance.…

Guide on AWS CloudWatch Alarms

AWS CloudWatch Alarms are an essential component of AWS cloud services. They monitor your applications, collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, set alarms, and automatically react to changes in your AWS resources.

Importance: AWS CloudWatch Alarms are necessary for real-time monitoring of AWS resources and applications. They continually monitor your service metrics, check alarm thresholds, and send notifications or make automated actions when the threshold is breached. This helps in quick detection and rectification of issues, thus ensuring smooth and uninterrupted services.

Working: AWS CloudWatch Alarms work on metric data queries. When you create an alarm, you set a metric or expression along with a condition and threshold. The alarm will check this periodically and change its state if the conditions match the threshold. The state of the alarm changes among 'OK', 'INSUFFICIENT_DATA', and 'ALARM' depending on metric data.

Exam Tips: In the AWS Solution Architect exam, understanding AWS CloudWatch Alarms is crucial. Here are some tips:
- Understand the components of AWS CloudWatch Alarms including metric math expressions, anomaly detection, and threshold.
- Remember that you can set alarms for AWS resources metrics like CPU Utilization, Disk Read/Write, Network In/Out, etc.
- Know the difference between composite alarms and metric alarms.
- Understand the actions of an alarm, i.e., what happens when state changes ('OK', 'INSUFFICIENT_DATA', 'ALARM').
- Understand how billing alarms can be set to control the AWS cost.
- Exam questions may involve setting alarm thresholds and deciding on what action to take under alarm state.
- Questions on limits of alarms, i.e., how many actions per alarm, how many alarms per AWS account, etc. can be expected. Understand these well.

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Question 1

A company wants to monitor their AWS resources and trigger an alarm when the average CPU utilization is above 70% for a 5-minute period on their EC2 instances. Which AWS service should be used?

Amazon Inspector Amazon CloudWatch AWS Trusted Advisor AWS Config

Correct Answer: Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch monitors AWS resources and applications, collects and tracks metrics, sets alarms, and provides a unified view of operational data. In this case, CloudWatch is the best service for monitoring and setting alarms for CPU utilization.

Question 2

A company wants to get notified when an Amazon RDS DB instance fails over. Which method can be used to create an alarm for this situation?

Enable Auto Scaling for the RDS instances to ensure failover does not occur Create an Amazon CloudWatch Events rule to listen for RDS failover events Monitor Amazon RDS instance with Amazon Inspector Create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm based on the RDS CPU Utilization

Correct Answer: Create an Amazon CloudWatch Events rule to listen for RDS failover events

An Amazon CloudWatch Events rule can listen for RDS failover events and take actions when they occur, such as notifying the team. The other options are not directly related to detecting and handling RDS failover events.

Question 3

An AWS Lambda function is exceeding the expected duration, causing performance issues. Which AWS service can be used to set up an alarm to notify when the function durations exceed a specified threshold?

AWS Config Amazon CloudWatch AWS X-Ray Amazon QuickSight