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AWS Certification CloudOps Engineer Associate (SysOps) 2026 past questions and answers

This 2026 AWS Certification CloudOps Engineer Associate (SysOps) set has 20 practice questions. Try these 5 free sample questions, tap a question to reveal the answer and explanation. Then practise the whole 2026 set with instant marking.

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Sample AWS Certification CloudOps Engineer Associate (SysOps) 2026 questions

1. A Linux EC2 fleet has stable CPU utilization, but operators suspect memory pressure before instances begin swapping. They need a CloudWatch metric for memory utilization without deploying a custom monitoring platform. What should they do?
  1. Enable detailed monitoring for each instance; it publishes memory metrics automatically.
  2. Create an EC2 status-check alarm and use its value as the memory utilization metric.
  3. Install and configure the Amazon CloudWatch agent to publish memory metrics to the CWAgent namespace.
  4. Enable VPC Flow Logs and create a metric filter for memory utilization.

Answer: C. Install and configure the Amazon CloudWatch agent to publish memory metrics to the CWAgent namespace.

EC2 detailed monitoring provides more frequent standard instance metrics, not guest memory metrics. The CloudWatch agent collects operating-system metrics such as memory utilization and publishes them to CloudWatch.

2. An application writes one JSON log event for every failed payment to a CloudWatch Logs log group. The operations team needs an alarm whenever at least five failures occur in a five-minute period, without continuously querying the log group. Which solution is the simplest?
  1. Create a metric filter matching the failure event and alarm on its five-minute Sum.
  2. Run a CloudWatch Logs Insights query every minute and have an operator inspect its results.
  3. Export the log group to S3 each night and alarm on the S3 object count.
  4. Enable CloudTrail data events for the payment log group and alarm on API calls.

Answer: A. Create a metric filter matching the failure event and alarm on its five-minute Sum.

A metric filter converts matching log events into a CloudWatch metric, which can be aggregated over five minutes and used by an alarm. Logs Insights is useful for interactive analysis but requires a separate recurring query and alarm workflow.

3. A customer-facing checkout workflow occasionally fails only when a user completes several steps in sequence. The team wants scheduled, end-to-end checks from multiple AWS Regions and alarms on failures. Which service best meets the requirement?
  1. AWS CloudTrail event history
  2. Amazon Inspector scans
  3. AWS Config conformance packs
  4. Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics canaries

Answer: D. Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics canaries

CloudWatch Synthetics canaries run scripted checks on a schedule from selected locations and publish success and latency metrics that can drive alarms. CloudTrail and Config record or evaluate configuration activity; they do not execute user-like workflow tests.

4. After a release, an instrumented API's p95 response time increases. Operators need to see which downstream service call is consuming the added time and inspect request paths across the application. Which tool is most appropriate?
  1. Amazon CloudWatch billing alarms
  2. AWS X-Ray traces and service map
  3. AWS Trusted Advisor cost checks
  4. Amazon EC2 instance status checks

Answer: B. AWS X-Ray traces and service map

X-Ray traces show request segments and timing across instrumented services, while the service map helps identify slow dependencies. Billing alarms and instance status checks do not provide request-level latency breakdowns.

5. A production application uses an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. The business requires automatic recovery from an Availability Zone failure with minimal database interruption; read scaling is not required. Which configuration should the operator use?
  1. Create a read replica in the same Availability Zone and direct writes to it.
  2. Enable Multi-AZ deployment for the DB instance.
  3. Export a snapshot to S3 after every transaction.
  4. Place the DB instance in a public subnet and enable an Elastic IP address.

Answer: B. Enable Multi-AZ deployment for the DB instance.

RDS Multi-AZ maintains a synchronous standby in another Availability Zone and supports managed failover for availability. A read replica is primarily for read scaling and does not provide the same automatic Multi-AZ standby behavior.

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