AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate — Question 380

A company needs to track spending in its AWS account. The company must receive a notification when current costs and forecasted costs exceed specific thresholds.

Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Create a new IAM role. Attach the AWSPurchaseOrdersServiceRolePolicy AWS managed policy to the role. Check AWS Cost Explorer on a regular basis to monitor current costs and forecasted costs.
• B. Create an AWS Cost and Usage Report. Create an AWS Step Functions state machine that runs when a new usage file is generated. Configure the state machine to pass the data to Amazon Forecast and to invoke an AWS Lambda function. Configure the Lambda function to parse the data and to send a notification to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic if costs exceed the thresholds.
• C. Create an AWS Cost and Usage Report. Separate the current costs and forecasted costs by service. Schedule the report to be sent to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic each month.
• D. Create a recurring cost budget in AWS Budgets. Create an alert for the actual cost. Create a second alert for the forecasted costs. Configure an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic to receive the alerts.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

AWS Budgets offers a built-in, low-overhead feature to track costs and automatically dispatch alerts via Amazon SNS for both actual and forecasted budget thresholds. Using AWS Cost and Usage Reports with Lambda or Step Functions introduces significant, unnecessary operational overhead for a native capability. Manual checking in AWS Cost Explorer fails to meet the requirement for automated notifications.