AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 210

A company wants to experiment with individual AWS accounts for its engineer team. The company wants to be notified as soon as the Amazon EC2 instance usage for a given month exceeds a specific threshold for each account.

What should a solutions architect do to meet this requirement MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. Use Cost Explorer to create a daily report of costs by service. Filter the report by EC2 instances. Configure Cost Explorer to send an Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) notification when a threshold is exceeded.
• B. Use Cost Explorer to create a monthly report of costs by service. Filter the report by EC2 instances. Configure Cost Explorer to send an Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) notification when a threshold is exceeded.
• C. Use AWS Budgets to create a cost budget for each account. Set the period to monthly. Set the scope to EC2 instances. Set an alert threshold for the budget. Configure an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic to receive a notification when a threshold is exceeded.
• D. Use AWS Cost and Usage Reports to create a report with hourly granularity. Integrate the report data with Amazon Athena. Use Amazon EventBridge to schedule an Athena query. Configure an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic to receive a notification when a threshold is exceeded.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

The correct answer is C because AWS Budgets is specifically designed to monitor costs and usage, allowing alerts when thresholds are exceeded, which is ideal for tracking EC2 instance costs. The other options involve more complex setups or reports that do not provide timely alerts based on usage thresholds as effectively as AWS Budgets.