Which term describes monitoring of applications and servers and automatically adjusting capacity to maintain performance at the lowest cost?

• A. Traffic
• B. Runbook
• C. SOAR
• D. Autoscaling

Answer: (D)

The idea being tested is automatic resource provisioning, where capacity is adjusted in real time in response to load to keep performance steady while avoiding unnecessary costs. This is autoscaling. It relies on monitoring signals such as CPU usage, request rate, latency, or queue depth and applying predefined policies to decide when to add or remove compute resources. The aim is to keep response times and availability stable, but not pay for idle capacity, so the system scales up when demand rises and scales down when demand falls. In practice, autoscaling helps maintain performance at the lowest possible cost by continuously balancing demand with available resources.

The other terms don’t describe this behavior. Traffic is about the flow of requests and can influence scaling, but it isn’t the mechanism that automatically adjusts capacity. A runbook is a documented set of steps for handling incidents or tasks. SOAR focuses on security orchestration, automation, and response.