Amazon Amazon Certifications SAP-C01 Questions & Answers

• Question 551:

  An AWS account owner has setup multiple IAM users. One of these IAM users, named John, has CloudWatch access, but no access to EC2 services. John has setup an alarm action which stops EC2 instances when their CPU utilization is below the threshold limit.

  When an EC2 instance's CPU Utilization rate drops below the threshold John has set, what will happen and why?

  A. CloudWatch will stop the instance when the action is executed

  B. Nothing will happen. John cannot set an alarm on EC2 since he does not have the permission.

  C. Nothing will happen. John can setup the action, but it will not be executed because he does not have EC2 access through IAM policies.

  D. Nothing will happen because it is not possible to stop the instance using the CloudWatch alarm

  Correct Answer: C

  Amazon CloudWatch alarms watch a single metric over a time period that the user specifies and performs one or more actions based on the value of the metric relative to a given threshold over a number of time periods. The user can setup an action which stops the instances when their CPU utilization is below a certain threshold for a certain period of time. The EC2 action can either terminate or stop the instance as part of the EC2 action. If the IAM user has read/write permissions for Amazon CloudWatch but not for Amazon EC2, he can still create an alarm. However, the stop or terminate actions will not be performed on the Amazon EC2 instance.

  Reference: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuide/UsingAlarmActions.html

• Question 552:

  A user has enabled detailed CloudWatch monitoring with the AWS Simple Notification Service. Which of the below mentioned statements helps the user understand detailed monitoring better?

  A. SNS cannot provide data every minute

  B. SNS will send data every minute after configuration

  C. There is no need to enable since SNS provides data every minute

  D. AWS CloudWatch does not support monitoring for SNS

  Correct Answer: A

  CloudWatch is used to monitor AWS as well as the custom services. It provides either basic or detailed monitoring for the supported AWS products. In basic monitoring, a service sends data points to CloudWatch every five minutes, while in detailed monitoring a service sends data points to CloudWatch every minute. The AWS SNS service sends data every 5 minutes. Thus, it supports only the basic monitoring. The user cannot enable detailed monitoring with SNS.

  Reference: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuide/supported_services.html

• Question 553:

  How many metrics are supported by CloudWatch for Auto Scaling?

  A. 7 metrics and 5 dimension

  B. 5 metrics and 1 dimension

  C. 1 metric and 5 dimensions

  D. 8 metrics and 1 dimension

  Correct Answer: D

  AWS Auto Scaling supports both detailed as well as basic monitoring of the CloudWatch metrics. Basic monitoring happens every 5 minutes, while detailed monitoring happens every minute. It supports 8 metrics and 1 dimension. The metrics are: GroupMinSize GroupMaxSize GroupDesiredCapacity GroupInServiceInstances GroupPendingInstances GroupStandbyInstances GroupTerminatingInstances GroupTotalInstances The dimension is AutoScalingGroupName

  Reference: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuide/supported_services.html

• Question 554:

  You set up your first Lambda function and want to set up some Cloudwatch metrics to monitor your function. Which of the following Lambda metrics can Cloudwatch monitor?

  A. Total requests only

  B. Status Check Failed, total requests, and error rates

  C. Total requests and CPU utilization

  D. Total invocations, errors, duration, and throttles

  Correct Answer: D

  AWS Lambda automatically monitors functions on your behalf, reporting metrics through Amazon CloudWatch (CloudWatch). These metrics include total invocations, errors, duration, and throttles.

  Reference: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/monitoring-functions-metrics.html

• Question 555:

  A user is trying to send custom metrics to CloudWatch using the PutMetricData APIs. Which of the below mentioned points should the user needs to take care while sending the data to CloudWatch?

  A. The size of a request is limited to 8KB for HTTP GET requests and 40KB for HTTP POST requests

  B. The size of a request is limited to 16KB for HTTP GET requests and 80KB for HTTP POST requests

  C. The size of a request is limited to 128KB for HTTP GET requests and 64KB for HTTP POST requests

  D. The size of a request is limited to 40KB for HTTP GET requests and 8KB for HTTP POST requests

  Correct Answer: A

  With AWS CloudWatch, the user can publish data points for a metric that share not only the same time stamp, but also the same namespace and dimensions. CloudWatch can accept multiple data points in the same PutMetricData call with the same time stamp. The only thing that the user needs to take care of is that the size of a PutMetricData request is limited to 8KB for HTTP GET requests and 40KB for HTTP POST requests.

  Reference: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuide/cloudwatch_concepts.html

• Question 556:

  You have set up a huge amount of network infrastructure in AWS and you now need to think about monitoring all of this. You decide CloudWatch will best fit your needs but you are unsure of the pricing structure and the limitations of CloudWatch.

  Which of the following statements is TRUE in relation to the limitations of CloudWatch?

  A. You get 10 CloudWatch metrics, 10 alarms, 1,000,000 API requests, and 1,000 Amazon SNS email notifications per customer per month for free.

  B. You get 100 CloudWatch metrics, 100 alarms, 10,000,000 API requests, and 10,000 Amazon SNS email notifications per customer per month for free.

  C. You get 10 CloudWatch metrics, 10 alarms, 1,000 API requests, and 100 Amazon SNS email notifications per customer per month for free.

  D. You get 100 CloudWatch metrics, 100 alarms, 1,000,000 API requests, and 1,000 Amazon SNS email notifications per customer per month for free.

  Correct Answer: A

  Amazon CloudWatch monitors your Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources and the applications you run

  on AWS in real-time. You can use CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, which are the variables you

  want to measure for your resources and applications.

  CloudWatch has the following limits:

  You get 10 CloudWatch metrics, 10 alarms, 1,000,000 API requests, and 1,000 Amazon SNS email

  notifications per customer per month for free.

  You can assign up to 10 dimensions per metric.

  You can create up to 5000 alarms per AWS account. Metric data is kept for 2 weeks.

  The size of a PutMetricData request is limited to 8KB for HTTP GET requests and 40KB for HTTP POST

  requests.

  You can include a maximum of 20 MetricDatum items in one PutMetricData request. A MetricDatum can

  contain a single value or a StatisticSet representing many values.

  Reference:

  http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuide/cloudwatch_limits.html

• Question 557:

  What is the maximum number of data points for an HTTP data request that a user can include in PutMetricRequest in the CloudWatch?

  A. 30

  B. 50

  C. 10

  D. 20

  Correct Answer: D

  The size of a PutMetricData request of CloudWatch is limited to 8KB for the HTTP GET requests and 40KB for the HTTP POST requests. The user can include a maximum of 20 data points in one PutMetricData request.

  Reference: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuide/cloudwatch_concepts.html

• Question 558:

  A user is sending a custom metric to CloudWatch. If the call to the CloudWatch APIs has different dimensions, but the same metric name, how will CloudWatch treat all the requests?

  A. It will reject the request as there cannot be a separate dimension for a single metric.

  B. It will group all the calls into a single call.

  C. It will treat each unique combination of dimensions as a separate metric.

  D. It will overwrite the previous dimension data with the new dimension data.

  Correct Answer: C

  A dimension is a key-value pair used to uniquely identify a metric. CloudWatch treats each unique

  combination of dimensions as a separate metric.

  Thus, if the user is making 4 calls with the same metric name but a separate dimension, it will create 4

  separate metrics.

  Reference:

  http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuide/cloudwatch_concepts.html

• Question 559:

  A user has created a launch configuration for Auto Scaling where CloudWatch detailed monitoring is disabled. The user wants to now enable detailed monitoring.

  How can the user achieve this?

  A. Update the Launch config with CLI to set InstanceMonitoringDisabled = false

  B. The user should change the Auto Scaling group from the AWS console to enable detailed monitoring

  C. Create a new Launch Config with detail monitoring enabled and update the Auto Scaling group

  D. Update the Launch config with CLI to set InstanceMonitoring.Enabled = true

  Correct Answer: C

  CloudWatch is used to monitor AWS as well as the custom services. To enable detailed instance monitoring for a new Auto Scaling group, the user does not need to take any extra steps. When the user creates the Auto Scaling launch config as the first step for creating an Auto Scaling group, each launch configuration contains a flag named InstanceMonitoring.Enabled. The default value of this flag is true. When the user has created a launch configuration with InstanceMonitoring.Enabled = false it will involve multiple steps to enable detail monitoring. The steps are:

  1.

  Create a new Launch config with detailed monitoring enabled

  2.

  Update the Auto Scaling group with a new launch config

  3.

  Enable detail monitoring on each EC2 instance

  Reference: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuide/as-metricscollected.html

• Question 560:

  A user is running a critical batch process which runs for 1 hour and 50 mins every day at a fixed time. Which of the below mentioned options is the right instance type and costing model in this case if the user performs the same task for the whole year?

  A. Instance store backed instance with spot instance pricing.

  B. EBS backed instance with standard reserved upfront instance pricing.

  C. EBS backed scheduled reserved instance with partial instance pricing.

  D. EBS backed instance with on-demand instance pricing.

  Correct Answer: D

  For Amazon Web Services, the reserved instance (standard or convertible) helps the user save money if the user is going to run the same instance for a longer period. Generally, if the user uses the instances around 30-40% of the year annually it is recommended to use RI. Here as the instance runs only for 1 hour 50 minutes daily, or less than 8 percent of the year, it is not recommended to have RI as it will be costlier. At its highest potential savings, you are still paying 25 percent of an annual cost for a reserved instance you are you using less than 2 hours a day, (or less than 8 percent of each year) you are not saving money. Even a scheduled reserved instance has a key limitation, which is that it cannot be stopped or rebooted, only manually terminated with a possibility that it could be restarted. You would have to terminate and restart it within the 1 hour 50-minute window, otherwise you would need to wait until the next day. For a critical daily process, this is likely not an option. Spot Instances are not ideal because the process is critical, and must run for a fixed length of time at a fixed time of day. Spot instances would stop and start based on fluctuations in instance pricing, leaving this process potentially unfinished. The user should use on-demand with EBS in this case. While it has the highest cost, it also has the greatest flexibility to ensure that a critical process like this is always completed.

  Reference: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-instances/