Amazon Web Services Updated DOP-C02 Exam Questions and Answers by brooklyn

Container restart failures require detailed observability into pod-level, node-level, and container-level metrics and logs. CloudWatch Container Insights is purpose-built for Kubernetes operational diagnostics and provides granular visibility into CPU, memory, network I/O, disk I/O, container restarts, OOM kills, throttling, pod lifecycle issues, and Kubernetes control plane behaviors.

The CloudWatch Observability add-on deploys Fluent Bit and the CloudWatch Agent directly into the EKS cluster as DaemonSets. These components automatically collect:

Container logs

Pod metrics

Node metrics

Cluster events

OOM errors

CrashLoopBackOff restart cycles

Control plane request anomalies

With this data, the DevOps engineer can easily identify misconfigurations, resource bottlenecks, unhealthy nodes, failing containers, or image pull issues.

Option A (dashboards only) lacks per-container diagnostic data.

Option B (CloudTrail) only logs API calls — not useful for restart debugging.

Option C (CloudTrail Insights) only detects anomalous API usage, not container failures.

Therefore, CloudWatch Container Insights is the correct and AWS-recommended solution for diagnosing container restart failures in EKS.

Accessing a secret from AWS Secrets Manager that is encrypted with a customer managed KMS key requires two distinct permission layers to succeed:

Secrets Manager permissions (via IAM) such as secretsmanager:GetSecretValue for the IAM role assumed by the Kubernetes service account.

KMS key usage permissions in the KMS key policy , allowing the same IAM principal to perform kms:Decrypt (and possibly kms:GenerateDataKey ) on the customer managed key.

In this scenario, the service account assumes an IAM role explicitly created to access the secrets. The symptom is an HTTP 403 “Access Denied” when retrieving the secret. If the IAM role has Secrets Manager permissions but the call still fails, the typical root cause is that the KMS key policy does not trust or allow that IAM role , so the decrypt operation fails.

Option B correctly identifies that the KMS key policy must include the Kubernetes service account IAM role as a principal with the appropriate KMS actions.

Option A and C refer to the EKS cluster IAM role, which is not the principal making the call. Option D is unrelated: the role’s ability to “access the EKS cluster” does not affect its ability to call Secrets Manager or KMS. The missing KMS key policy permission is the underlying cause.

The following are the steps that the DevOps engineer should take to ensure that all EBS volumes always have the Backup_Frequency tag so that the company can perform backups at least weekly unless a different value is specified:

Set up AWS Config in the account.

Use a managed rule that returns a compliance failure for EC2::Volume resources that do not have a Backup Frequency tag applied.

Configure a remediation action that uses a custom AWS Systems Manager Automation runbook to apply the Backup_Frequency tag with a value of weekly.

The managed rule AWS::Config::EBSVolumesWithoutBackupTag will return a compliance failure for any EBS volume that does not have the Backup_Frequency tag applied. The remediation action will then use the Systems Manager Automation runbook to apply the Backup_Frequency tag with a value of weekly to the EBS volume.

To allow only creation/configuration of service-linked roles , you need a way to tightly scope what IAM actions the developer can perform. The most AWS-appropriate mechanism for “delegate limited IAM admin” is a role with a permissions boundary :

A permissions boundary sets the maximum permissions the role (and any roles it creates, depending on design) can ever have. This is a standard pattern to safely delegate IAM tasks without granting broad IAM administration.

You can define the role’s policy + boundary so the developer can call only the APIs required for service-linked roles (for example actions like creating service-linked roles and passing only allowed AWS service principals), while preventing general role/policy creation outside that scope.

Why the others don’t meet “service-linked roles only”:

A is vague (“common services”) and cross-account access doesn’t inherently restrict to only service-linked roles. It’s also more operational overhead than needed for a single dev account use case.

B PowerUserAccess is far too broad and does not restrict to service-linked roles.

C An SCP with Deny iam:* would block IAM entirely (including what the developer needs). Even if refined, SCPs set account-wide guardrails and are not the right tool to grant a single developer the precise ability to create only service-linked roles.