AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 320

A user is configuring a CloudWatch alarm on RDS to receive a notification when the CPU utilization of RDS is higher than 50%. The user has setup an alarm when there is some inactivity on RDS, such as RDS unavailability. How can the user configure this?

Answer options

• A. Setup the notification when the CPU is more than 75% on RDS
• B. Setup the notification when the state is Insufficient Data
• C. Setup the notification when the CPU utilization is less than 10%
• D. It is not possible to setup the alarm on RDS

Correct answer: B

Explanation

When an Amazon RDS instance becomes unavailable or inactive, it stops sending metrics to Amazon CloudWatch, which transitions the alarm state to 'INSUFFICIENT_DATA'. By configuring the CloudWatch alarm to trigger a notification during this state, the user can be alerted to potential RDS downtime or inactivity. Options A and C monitor specific CPU thresholds that do not directly indicate instance unavailability, while option D is incorrect because this configuration is fully supported.