Why This Cheat Sheet Matters for SOA-C03
This cheat sheet covers the most important Amazon CloudWatch concepts tested on the SOA-C03 (AWS CloudOps Engineer Associate) certification exam. It contains 3 sections with 12 key points that you should memorize before exam day. Master CloudWatch metrics, alarms, dashboards, Logs, Logs Insights, anomaly detection, composite alarms, and metric filters for operational visibility. Use this as a quick-reference guide during your final review sessions.
3Sections
12Key Points
Metrics and Alarms
- Standard metrics come from AWS services; custom metrics are published with PutMetricData or agents.
- High-resolution custom metrics can use 1-second granularity, but they cost more than standard resolution.
- Datapoints-to-alarm lets you require sustained breaches, such as 3 out of 3 periods above a threshold.
- Composite alarms combine alarm states and help reduce alert noise.
Logs
- CloudWatch Logs stores log groups and log streams from applications, agents, and AWS services.
- Metric filters transform matching log events into CloudWatch metrics that can drive alarms.
- Logs Insights is used for ad hoc queries across log groups.
- Subscription filters stream logs to Lambda, Kinesis Data Streams, or Firehose.
Exam Cues
- Need API audit history: use CloudTrail, not CloudWatch metrics.
- Need application log search: use CloudWatch Logs Insights.
- Need dependency tracing: use AWS X-Ray.
- Need one alert only when several alarms are in ALARM: use a composite alarm.
Practice CloudWatch Questions
Put your knowledge to the test with practice questions.