Cloud+ Cost Spikes Investigation Quiz

1. When investigating cost spikes, you need to correlate billing data with infrastructure changes. Which tool is most effective?

Cloud cost management platform with change tracking integration

Text editor and manual spreadsheets

Email communication only

Printed billing statements

2. You find that a scheduled task is creating temporary resources but failing to clean them up. What is the recommended fix?

Implement automated cleanup scripts with proper error handling and resource lifecycle policies

Manually delete resources each time

Stop running all scheduled tasks

Ignore the temporary resources

3. During cost spike investigation, you discover untagged resources. Why is tagging critical for cost management?

Tags enable cost allocation, chargeback, and tracking by department or project

Tags have no financial impact

Tags are only for security purposes

Tagging increases costs

4. Your organization's cloud bill increased after implementing redundancy for high availability. What cost optimization strategy applies here?

Use spot instances for non-critical redundant components or optimize resource allocation

Eliminate all redundancy

Accept the cost without review

Switch to a single-region deployment

5. A legacy application is running on oversized instances that were never right-sized. Which approach reduces costs without disruption?

Gradually test smaller instance types and resize based on performance metrics

Immediately force a smaller instance size

Keep using oversized instances

Migrate to a completely different platform

6. When setting up cost alerts, what threshold strategy minimizes false positives while catching real spikes?

Use baseline-relative thresholds and percentage increase limits

Alert on every single transaction

Set alerts only for maximum possible spending

Disable all alerts

7. You notice costs increased significantly after enabling detailed monitoring and logging. Is this expected?

Yes, detailed logging and monitoring services incur additional charges

No, monitoring should be free

Only if you use premium features

Monitoring costs are always included

8. A third-party integration is making excessive API calls, driving up your cloud costs. What is the first diagnostic step?

Monitor API call patterns and review integration logs for anomalies

Immediately disconnect the integration

Increase API rate limits

Switch to a different third-party service

9. You identify that cross-region data replication is causing high data transfer costs. What optimization technique is most appropriate?

Evaluate replication necessity, reduce frequency, or consolidate regions

Eliminate all replication

Increase bandwidth limits

Use only a single data center

10. A database backup job is running multiple times per day, causing unexpected storage and compute charges. How do you resolve this?

Review backup schedules, consolidate jobs, and implement retention policies

Delete all backups

Stop all database operations

Increase storage capacity indefinitely

11. Which metric should you check first when investigating a sudden spike in your monthly cloud bill?

Network bandwidth consumption across all instances

Historical cost trends and baseline spending patterns

Number of active user sessions

CPU temperature readings

12. Your cloud bill shows charges for 'premium support' that you did not authorize. What is the correct troubleshooting approach?

Review billing history, contact support, and verify account settings

Immediately cancel all services

Ignore the charges

Switch to a different cloud provider

13. A developer accidentally left a development environment running with high-spec resources for a week. What preventive measure should you implement?

Automated shutdown policies and resource tagging for non-production environments

Manual daily audits of all resources

Disable all development access

Use only production environments

14. Which cloud service is most likely causing high costs if your bill includes charges for 'data processed' or 'queries executed'?

Analytics, data warehouse, or query services

Virtual networking services

Identity and access management

Load balancing services

15. A misconfigured auto-scaling policy is causing instances to scale up continuously. How should you investigate this issue?

Review scaling metrics, thresholds, and recent policy changes

Restart all instances immediately

Delete the auto-scaling group

Increase the instance size instead

16. You discover that reserved instances are not being fully utilized. What action reduces waste without losing reserved capacity benefits?

Cancel all reserved instances immediately

Consolidate workloads or adjust instance sizes to match reserved capacity

Switch to more expensive on-demand pricing

Ignore the unused capacity

17. A cost spike occurred after deploying a new application. Which logging mechanism helps identify the exact resource consuming excess capacity?

Cloud provider billing API and cost allocation tags

Operating system event logs only

Network packet captures

Email notifications from support

18. Unused storage accounts and snapshots are contributing to cost overruns. What is the best practice for identifying these resources?

Use cloud provider cost analysis tools and tag-based filtering

Manually review all resource names

Check server logs every hour

Increase your budget threshold

19. You notice a 300% increase in compute costs. Which resource should you examine for orphaned or unattached instances?

Virtual machine instances and containers

DNS records and routing policies

IAM policies and role assignments

VPC peering connections

20. What is the primary cause of unexpected cloud costs related to data transfer?

Excessive egress traffic between regions or to the internet

Unused security group rules

Misconfigured load balancer health checks

Outdated API versions

Cloud+ Investigating Unexpected Cloud Cost Spikes Quiz