SOA-C03 Monitoring, Remediation, and Performance Guide

AWS SOA-C03 monitoring guide covering CloudWatch, CloudTrail, alarms, EventBridge, and performance decisions.

This chapter is where SOA-C03 teaches the operational habit AWS cares about most: read the right signal first, then take the smallest safe corrective action. Questions here usually mix logs, alarms, dashboards, event routing, runbooks, and performance symptoms into one scenario.

Current weight in the exam guide

AWS currently weights Monitoring, Logging, Analysis, Remediation, and Performance Optimization at 22% of scored content.

Work this domain in order

Lesson Focus
1.1 CloudWatch, CloudTrail & Alarms Learn the monitoring and logging signals that tell you what changed, what is unhealthy, and who needs to know.
1.2 EventBridge, Remediation & Runbooks Learn how signals trigger safe operational action instead of only generating noise.
1.3 Compute, Storage & DB Performance Learn how to turn performance symptoms into targeted compute, storage, and database fixes.

Fast routing inside this chapter

If the question is really about… Go first to…
metrics, alarms, dashboards, CloudTrail, CloudWatch agent, or SNS notifications 1.1 CloudWatch, CloudTrail & Alarms
automated remediation, EventBridge rules, or Systems Manager Automation runbooks 1.2 EventBridge, Remediation & Runbooks
EBS, S3, EFS, FSx, RDS, EC2, or performance-efficiency tuning 1.3 Compute, Storage & DB Performance

What strong answers usually do

  • distinguish signal collection from remediation
  • prefer a low-risk automated action only when the trigger is trustworthy
  • follow metrics, logs, and event history before making manual changes
  • tune the narrowest resource that explains the symptom instead of broad overprovisioning

In this section

Revised on Sunday, May 10, 2026