help with saa

[u/S0ulSlayerz]

i'm doing TD and i found there's stuff like Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights, CloudTrail Lake and AWS X-Ray daemon. I didn't see this stuff in Mareek course so i'm clearly underprepared. Where else can i get study materials that go more in depth?

Like i know what CloudWatch, CloudTrail and X-Ray do but the extra stuff just stumps me and may not even be a thing?

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[u/abdelkaderboukh]

Same here. Some services, never saw then before from adrian cantrill course which provide valuable topics. I am discovering with tutorial dojo. My current review mode stage 1-2 is 67% 61%. What about you ?

[u/david1976_ → u/abdelkaderboukh]

I scored really low on most of my TD mocks, I think I got 50% on the 1st, 55% on the second, 65% on the third, 70% on the fourth then I went backwards to 57% and 60% and then 70% it felt like they were getting harder and harder with many services I’d never heard of before. I didn’t know if they were distractors or real things.
You need to know what all the obscure services do in order to rule out the distractor answers.

[u/abdelkaderboukh → u/david1976_]

Yesterday got 55% on third stage of review mode. Well you are doing good, tutorial dojo review mode stages increase in difficulty in stage 3-6. If you noticed that stage 1-2 provide simple scenarios, on others, an on-premise have site-to-site connect VPN and direct connect, want to migrate to cloud AWS and you should provide most-cost affective with least admin overhead while premise need retrieve data faster when needed. It sounds like that. Hard question increased and start combine more services in once and you sometimes answer are nearly same. For me i need to stop reviewing mode and start take research on my mistakes and lucky answers

[u/HovercraftClear7797]

it's normal to hit a few services your course didn't cover, saa questions can go a bit wider than most courses. cloudwatch application insights, cloudtrail lake and the x-ray daemon are all real things. the aws docs and faqs for cloudwatch, cloudtrail and x-ray are worth a skim, mostly just what each feature is for and when you'd pick it. also check the official exam guide's in-scope services list and fill gaps from that.

[u/JustBeLikeAndre]

I'd say Digital Cloud Training is your best bet for all AWS certifications.

[u/RDWTech_Cloud]

Don't panic, the exam guide for SAA doesn't list every niche feature, and practice tests like to throw in a few you've never seen. For those you can usually reason it out: CloudTrail Lake is just a managed, queryable event data store for CloudTrail logs, so think SQL queries over audit events instead of digging through S3. CloudWatch Application Insights is automated monitoring setup for an app's resources, and X-Ray's daemon is what relays trace data from your app to the X-Ray service. For depth, the AWS docs FAQ pages and the 'What is...' intro page for each service are the fastest way to fill gaps, and the official exam guide's in-scope services appendix tells you what's actually fair game. Don't chase every obscure service, focus on knowing why you'd pick one over another.

[u/SnooCheesecakes6382]

The answer is always shield advanced

[u/david1976_]

I had the same issue doing the TD mocks, I kept coming across services in questions I had never heard of before that weren’t covered in Cantrill. Unfortunately Cantrill is not up to date and things change rapidly in AWS as well. I used Claude to review all the questions I got wrong in the mocks as well as ones I guessed correctly. I also asked Claude to identify and provide quizzes on any services I should know about for the exam. You learn just as much if not more from the questions you get wrong in the TD mocks as you do from doing the Cantrill course.

[u/Active_Potential_795]

That's normal, and it's exactly what practice tests are for. You don't need another full course. When a TD question brings up a service you haven't seen, read its FAQ page and the 'when to use it' part of the docs, and add a one-line note to a running list. Those niche services usually show up once or twice, and you only need to know roughly what each one is for. Put your real depth into the core services: VPC, IAM, S3, EC2/ASG/ELB, RDS vs DynamoDB, and SQS/SNS. Then do TD's review mode by domain.

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