AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 729

You have set up Individual AWS accounts for each project. You have been asked to make sure your AWS Infrastructure costs do not exceed the budget set per project for each month.
Which of the following approaches can help ensure that you do not exceed the budget each month?

Answer options

• A. Consolidate your accounts so you have a single bill for all accounts and projects
• B. Set up auto scaling with CloudWatch alarms using SNS to notify you when you are running too many Instances in a given account
• C. Set up CloudWatch billing alerts for all AWS resources used by each project, with a notification occurring when the amount for each resource tagged to a particular project matches the budget allocated to the project.
• D. Set up CloudWatch billing alerts for all AWS resources used by each account, with email notifications when it hits 50%. 80% and 90% of its budgeted monthly spend

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Setting up CloudWatch billing alerts at tiered thresholds (such as 50%, 80%, and 90%) for each individual account allows administrators to proactively track spending and take corrective action before the budget is exceeded. Consolidated billing only aggregates payments and does not actively prevent overspending on individual projects, while resource-tagging alerts are more complex and less effective than account-level billing alerts for this scenario. Therefore, monitoring account-level spend with proactive milestone alerts is the most reliable approach.