AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 633

A company runs its applications on Amazon EC2 instances. The company performs periodic financial assessments of its AWS costs. The company recently identified unusual spending.

The company needs a solution to prevent unusual spending. The solution must monitor costs and notify responsible stakeholders in the event of unusual spending.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Use an AWS Budgets template to create a zero spend budget.
• B. Create an AWS Cost Anomaly Detection monitor in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console.
• C. Create AWS Pricing Calculator estimates for the current running workload pricing details.
• D. Use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor costs and to identify unusual spending.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection uses machine learning to continuously monitor cost and usage to detect unusual spend and notify stakeholders immediately. While AWS Budgets can track predefined spending limits, it does not dynamically detect anomalies. The AWS Pricing Calculator is a planning tool for cost estimation, and Amazon CloudWatch is not the primary tool for automated, ML-driven cost anomaly detection.