Amazon Exam SOA-C03 Topic 2 Question 1 Discussion

Actual exam question for Amazon's SOA-C03 exam

Question #: 1
Topic #: 2

Optimization]

A company has a workload that is sending log data to Amazon CloudWatch Logs. One of the fields includes a measure of application latency. A CloudOps engineer needs to monitor the p90 statistic of this field over time.

What should the CloudOps engineer do to meet this requirement?

ACreate an Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights rule on the log data.

BCreate a metric filter on the log data.

CCreate a subscription filter on the log data.

DCreate an Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights rule for the workload.

Show Suggested Answer

Suggested Answer: B

To analyze and visualize custom statistics such as the p90 latency (90th percentile), a CloudWatch metric must be generated from the log data. The correct method is to create a metric filter that extracts the latency value from each log event and publishes it as a CloudWatch metric. Once the metric is published, percentile statistics (p90, p95, etc.) can be displayed in CloudWatch dashboards or alarms.

AWS documentation states:

''You can use metric filters to extract numerical fields from log events and publish them as metrics in CloudWatch. CloudWatch supports percentile statistics such as p90 and p95 for these metrics.''

Contributor Insights (Option A) is for analyzing frequent contributors, not numeric distributions. Subscription filters (Option C) are used for log streaming, and Application Insights (Option D) provides monitoring of application health but not custom p90 statistics. Hence, Option B is the CloudOps-aligned, minimal-overhead solution for percentile latency monitoring.

References (AWS CloudOps Documents / Study Guide):

* AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer -- Associate (SOA-C03) Exam Guide -- Domain 1: Monitoring and Logging

* Amazon CloudWatch Logs -- Metric Filters

* AWS Well-Architected Framework -- Operational Excellence Pillar

by Celeste at Oct 30, 2025, 09:13 AM

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Lon

2 hours ago

I'm pretty confident that the answer is B) Create a metric filter on the log data. Metric filters allow you to extract specific metrics from log data, and the p90 statistic is exactly the kind of thing you'd want to monitor using this approach.

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Lisbeth

6 days ago

Okay, let me think this through. I know that Contributor Insights can be used to analyze log data and extract metrics, so that might be the way to go here. I'll need to double-check the details, but that's the option that stands out to me.

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Pearly

11 days ago

Hmm, this one seems tricky. I'm not super familiar with CloudWatch Insights and Application Insights, so I'd need to do some research on those features to figure out which one is best for monitoring the p90 statistic.

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Marge

17 days ago

I think I'd start by looking at the options and trying to understand what each one does. Creating a metric filter or subscription filter sounds like it could be relevant, but I'm not sure if that's the best approach for monitoring a specific statistic over time.

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