Amazon SOA-C03 Exam - Topic 5 Question 7 Discussion

Actual exam question for Amazon's SOA-C03 exam

Question #: 7
Topic #: 5

A CloudOps engineer needs to track the costs of data transfer between AWS Regions. The CloudOps engineer must implement a solution to send alerts to an email distribution list when transfer costs reach 75% of a specific threshold.

What should the CloudOps engineer do to meet these requirements?

ACreate an AWS Cost and Usage Report. Analyze the results in Amazon Athena. Configure an alarm to publish a message to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic when costs reach 75% of the threshold. Subscribe the email distribution list to the topic.

BCreate an Amazon CloudWatch billing alarm to detect when costs reach 75% of the threshold. Configure the alarm to publish a message to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. Subscribe the email distribution list to the topic.

CUse AWS Budgets to create a cost budget for data transfer costs. Set an alert at 75% of the budgeted amount. Configure the budget to send a notification to the email distribution list when costs reach 75% of the threshold.

DSet up a VPC flow log. Set up a subscription filter to an AWS Lambda function to analyze data transfer. Configure the Lambda function to send a notification to the email distribution list when costs reach 75% of the threshold.

Show Suggested Answer

Suggested Answer: C

According to the AWS Cloud Operations and Cost Management documentation, AWS Budgets is the recommended service to track and alert on cost thresholds across all AWS accounts and resources. It allows users to define cost, usage, or reservation budgets, and configure notifications to trigger when usage or cost reaches defined percentages of the budgeted value (e.g., 75%, 90%, 100%).

The AWS Budgets system integrates natively with Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) to deliver alerts to an email distribution list or SNS topic subscribers. AWS Budgets supports granular cost filters, including specific service categories such as data transfer, regions, or linked accounts, ensuring precise visibility into inter-Region transfer costs.

By contrast, CloudWatch billing alarms (Option B) monitor total account charges only and do not allow detailed service-level filtering, such as data transfer between Regions. Cost and Usage Reports (Option A) are for detailed cost analysis, not real-time alerting, and VPC Flow Logs (Option D) capture traffic data, not billing or cost-based metrics.

Thus, using AWS Budgets with a 75% alert threshold best satisfies the operational and notification requirements.

by Arlene at Nov 24, 2025, 06:34 AM

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3 months ago

I think option B is the way to go here. Creating a CloudWatch billing alarm and hooking it up to an SNS topic seems like the most straightforward approach.

upvoted 0 times

Shonda

3 months ago

Yeah, CloudWatch alarms are reliable for monitoring costs.

upvoted 0 times

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