AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 518

A SysOps Administrator must set up notifications for whenever combined billing exceeds a certain threshold for all AWS accounts within a company. The
Administrator has set up AWS Organizations and enabled Consolidated Billing.
Which additional steps must the Administrator perform to set up the billing alerts?

Answer options

• A. In the payer account: Enable billing alerts in the Billing and Cost Management console; publish an Amazon SNS message when the billing alert triggers.
• B. In each account: Enable billing alerts in the Billing and Cost Management console; set up a billing alarm in Amazon CloudWatch; publish an SNS message when the alarm triggers.
• C. In the payer account: Enable billing alerts in the Billing and Cost Management console; set up a billing alarm in the Billing and Cost Management console to publish an SNS message when the alarm triggers.
• D. In the payer account: Enable billing alerts in the Billing and Cost Management console; set up a billing alarm in Amazon CloudWatch; publish an SNS message when the alarm triggers.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

To monitor consolidated billing across all linked accounts, billing alerts must be enabled specifically within the payer (master) account of the AWS Organization. Once enabled, the actual billing alarm must be created in Amazon CloudWatch (in the us-east-1 region) to trigger an Amazon SNS notification when the threshold is exceeded. Configuring the alarm on individual accounts will not capture the combined total, and the alarm configuration itself is handled via CloudWatch rather than directly inside the Billing console.