Mixed practice exam 6

Explanation

Answer: A. AWS gives every customer, including those on Basic Support, all checks in the service limits category plus a selected set of security and fault tolerance checks such as MFA on the root account, Amazon S3 bucket permissions, and unrestricted specific ports in security groups. These are the checks where the risk of not seeing them is highest. Access to the full library of checks, along with automatic check updates and the Trusted Advisor API, requires a paid plan.

• B. Full access to all Trusted Advisor checks requires AWS Business Support+, AWS Enterprise Support, or AWS Unified Operations.
• C. Basic Support does receive a meaningful subset of checks, so Trusted Advisor is not entirely unavailable.
• D. Cost optimization checks are part of the full check set available on paid plans. They are not what Basic Support receives.

Explanation

Answer: B. AWS defines five severity levels with published first-response targets: general guidance at 24 hours, system impaired at 12 hours, production system impaired at four hours, production system down at one hour, and business-critical system down measured in minutes. Production system down means important functions of the application are unavailable and the business is significantly impacted, which is why AWS targets a one-hour first response. All of these severity levels require a paid support plan.

• A. Four hours is the target for 'production system impaired', where important functions are degraded rather than unavailable.
• C. 12 hours is the target for 'system impaired', which covers non-critical functions behaving abnormally or a time-sensitive development question.
• D. 24 hours is the target for 'general guidance', which covers development questions and feature requests.

Explanation

Answer: C. AWS Business Support+ is the entry point for full technical support. It provides 24x7 phone, web, and chat access to Cloud Support Engineers, an unlimited number of cases opened by any user with permissions, the complete set of Trusted Advisor checks, the AWS Support API, and third-party software support, with a documented minimum of USD 29 per month per account. Because the requirement stops short of a designated TAM, paying for a higher plan would buy capability the company has said it does not need.

• A. Basic Support cannot open technical support cases and gives only a subset of Trusted Advisor checks, so it fails several of the stated requirements.
• B. AWS Unified Operations adds managed incident response with Incident Management Engineers and a Domain Specialist Engineer, at the highest minimum commitment of all the plans.
• D. AWS Enterprise Support meets every requirement but adds a designated TAM, strategic business reviews, and a 15-minute business-critical response target, at a substantially higher minimum monthly charge.

Explanation

Answer: A and C. Two things reliably sit behind the paid support boundary. Technical support cases are unavailable on Basic Support entirely, and programmatic access to AWS Health through the AWS Health API requires AWS Business Support+, AWS Enterprise Support, or AWS Unified Operations. Both are about depth of engagement with AWS rather than visibility, which is the pattern that explains where AWS draws the line.

• B. The AWS Health Dashboard is available to all AWS customers at no additional cost and requires no setup.
• D. AWS Health events are delivered through Amazon EventBridge to all customers at no additional cost, with no support plan requirement.
• E. Service limit increase requests are one of the case types explicitly available to every customer, including those on Basic Support.

Explanation

Answer: A. The account-specific view of the AWS Health Dashboard reports events that affect the customer's own resources, rather than only general service status, which is what makes it possible to tell whether a problem is theirs or AWS's. Delivering those same AWS Health events to Amazon EventBridge, which is available to all customers at no additional cost, allows the company to trigger automated responses such as failover or notification without polling a dashboard.

• B. CloudTrail records API calls made in the account. It is not a feed of AWS service health events.
• C. CloudWatch alarms detect that a resource is unhealthy but cannot tell the team that AWS has published an event explaining why or when it will be resolved.
• D. Trusted Advisor evaluates configuration against best practices on a periodic basis. It is not a channel for real-time service event notification.

Explanation

Answer: A. AWS restructured its support portfolio in December 2025. The current lineup is Basic Support plus three paid plans: AWS Business Support+, AWS Enterprise Support, and AWS Unified Operations. The legacy AWS Developer Support, AWS Business Support, and AWS Enterprise On-Ramp plans closed to new subscriptions and are being discontinued on January 1, 2027, with Enterprise On-Ramp customers upgraded to AWS Enterprise Support during 2026. The legacy plans remain available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. Candidates should recognize both the legacy and the current names, because study material written before the change still uses the old lineup.

• B. Basic Support remains included with every AWS account at no additional charge.
• C. Both of those plans are on the retirement path and are closed to new subscriptions. AWS directs Developer Support customers to AWS Business Support+ and Enterprise On-Ramp customers to AWS Enterprise Support.
• D. AWS continues to offer several distinct paid plans differentiated by response time, technical engagement, and managed operations, not a single consolidated plan.

Explanation

Answer: C. The business-critical system down severity is reserved for situations where critical application functions are unavailable and the business is at risk, and AWS targets a first response of under 15 minutes at the AWS Enterprise Support level, which also provides the designated Technical Account Manager. AWS Unified Operations goes further still, with a five-minute response from an Incident Management Engineer and a designated TAM and Domain Specialist Engineer, but at a far higher minimum monthly commitment than the requirement calls for. The severity level and the plan work together: choosing the right severity earns the target response, and the plan determines what that target is.

• A. A one-hour target corresponds to the 'production system down' severity, which is a lower severity than 'business-critical system down' and therefore a slower target.
• B. Basic Support cannot open technical support cases at all, so no technical response target applies.
• D. AWS Business Support+ targets under 30 minutes for the same severity, which is slower, and it does not include a designated Technical Account Manager.

Explanation

Answer: A and B. Trusted Advisor is an advisory engine, and both of these statements define its shape. The six categories tell a candidate what kinds of question it answers, and the support plan boundary tells them who gets the full answer. Every customer sees all service limits checks plus selected security and fault tolerance checks; the complete library, automatic check updates, and the Trusted Advisor API come with AWS Business Support+, AWS Enterprise Support, or AWS Unified Operations.

• C. Trusted Advisor identifies optimization opportunities such as idle resources; it does not report cost by service and time period. AWS Cost Explorer remains the tool for analyzing spend.
• D. Trusted Advisor produces recommendations. Acting on them is the customer's responsibility, though some findings can be automated through other services.
• E. Trusted Advisor is available to standalone accounts as well. AWS Organizations membership affects organizational reporting views, not eligibility.

Explanation

Answer: B. AWS Countdown is the event management offering within AWS Support, providing specialist-led guidance in the planning phase and dedicated attention during a critical business event such as a launch, migration cutover, or seasonal peak. AWS introduced it as the successor to the earlier Infrastructure Event Management offering, and it is the current event management offering within AWS Support. Base AWS Countdown is included with AWS Enterprise Support, and AWS Countdown Premium is available as a paid add-on for AWS Business Support+ and AWS Enterprise Support customers and is included as a recurring subscription with AWS Unified Operations.

• A. A quota increase may well be a necessary preparation step, but on its own it is an administrative request rather than architectural and scaling guidance.
• C. Trusted Advisor runs automated checks and produces findings. It does not provide human engagement or event-specific planning.
• D. AWS Professional Services delivers project-based consulting engagements and is a legitimate option for some work, but it is not the AWS Support offering designed specifically for critical event readiness, and it is not the only route to event assistance.

Explanation

Answer: C. Basic Support does not permit technical support cases under any severity, so the only path to an AWS engineer for a technical question is to move to a paid plan. AWS re:Post is free and open to everyone, and AWS documents that questions from AWS Premium Support customers which the community does not answer are passed to AWS Support engineers. That routing is a benefit of already holding a paid plan, not a substitute for one.

• A. No automatic conversion exists on any plan, and it certainly does not create case entitlements that the account's support plan does not include.
• B. General guidance is a severity level available within paid support plans. Basic Support customers cannot create technical cases at any severity.
• D. The abuse report form exists for reporting abusive use of AWS resources to the AWS Trust and Safety team. It is not a technical support channel.