AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional — Question 141

A company is running an application on Amazon EC2 instances. A DevOps engineer needs to aggregate the application logs to a central system for the company's application team to search. A critical error message periodically appears in the log files. The DevOps engineer needs to notify the application team by email when these error messages occur.

Which solution will meet these requirements in the MOST operationally efficient manner?

Answer options

• A. Configure the unified Amazon CloudWatch agent on the EC2 instances to publish the application logs files to a CloudWatch log group. Configure a metric filter on the CloudWatch log group to detect the critical errors and to create a custom metric. Create an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. Configure a CloudWatch alarm to use the custom metric to notify the SNS topic. Subscribe the application team's email address to the SNS topic.
• B. Install the Amazon Kinesis agent on the EC2 instances. Configure the Kinesis agent with the location of the log files. Stream the logs to a Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream with an Amazon CloudWatch metrics stream as a destination. Configure an AWS Lambda function to detect the error message and to create a custom metric. Associate the Lambda function with the stream. Create an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. Configure a CloudWatch alarm to use the custom metric to notify the SNS topic. Subscribe the application team's email address to the SNS topic.
• C. Install the AWS X-Ray daemon on the EC2 instances. Instrument the application with the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT). Configure the ADOT collector with the location of the custom log files and the name of an Amazon CloudWatch log group. Use the CloudWatch embedded metric format to generate a custom metric that is based on the error message. Create an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. Configure a CloudWatch alarm to use the custom metric to notify the SNS topic. Subscribe the application team's email address to the SNS topic.
• D. Configure the unified Amazon CloudWatch agent on the EC2 instances to publish the application logs files to a CloudWatch log group. Create an Amazon OpenSearch Service domain. Subscribe the CloudWatch log group to the OpenSearch Service domain. Create an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. Configure an OpenSearch Service alert monitor to notify the SNS topic. Subscribe the application team's email address to the SNS topic.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Option A is the most operationally efficient solution as it uses the unified Amazon CloudWatch agent to publish logs directly to a CloudWatch log group, which simplifies the process of detecting critical errors and notifying the team via SNS. Options B and C introduce additional complexity by using Kinesis or AWS X-Ray, which are not necessary for this requirement. Option D adds OpenSearch Service, which complicates the architecture without providing extra value for log aggregation and alerting.