AWS DevOps Engineer Professional Practice Test

How do you get notified when Auto Scaling Groups fail to terminate instances?

1. Configure CloudWatch to log failures

2. Configure the ASG to send a notification to an SNS topic

3. Set up email alerts for the ASG

4. Use Lambda to monitor instance status

The correct answer is: Configure the ASG to send a notification to an SNS topic

Configuring the Auto Scaling Group (ASG) to send a notification to an SNS (Simple Notification Service) topic is the most effective way to be alerted when the ASG fails to terminate instances. This approach leverages AWS's serverless capability to facilitate real-time communication and ensures that notifications can reach multiple endpoints such as email, SMS, or even triggering other applications. When the ASG encounters difficulties in terminating instances, it triggers specific events. By associating these events with an SNS topic, you can receive notifications immediately. These notifications can include valuable details about the failure, which allows for a swift response and troubleshooting. This integration supports a proactive monitoring strategy, ensuring that you are always informed about the operational status of your infrastructure. In contrast, while logging failures using CloudWatch is beneficial for tracking and analyzing issues over time, it may not provide immediate notifications unless specifically set up with custom metrics and alarms, which makes it less responsive than direct SNS notifications. Email alerts can be part of the notification process but lack the robustness of an SNS setup, which allows for more versatile alert management. Using Lambda to monitor instance status introduces unnecessary complexity, as the primary function of Lambda would be to create custom monitoring logic when such events are already supported natively via SNS