A critical financial application is deployed on Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon CloudWatch Alarms are created to notify Amazon SNS topics when Amazon EC2 instance CPU utilization exceeds 70%. The team lead is looking to test these alarms before deploying EC2 instances to production.
How should a Sysops administrator perform testing of the Amazon CloudWatch Alarms in the most effective way?

Answer options:

A.Use third-party tools on Amazon EC2 instances to elevate CPU load which in turn will trigger an alarm sending notification to Amazon SNS topic.
B.Use cloudwatch-alarm-action-check rule from AWS Config to trigger an alarm sending notification to Amazon SNS topic.
C.Use SetAlarmState API call to trigger an alarm sending notification to Amazon SNS topic.
D.Use cloudwatch-alarm-settings-check rule from AWS Config to trigger an alarm sending notification to Amazon SNS topic.

Correct Answer: C
For testing of alarms created using Amazon CloudWatch Alarms, SetAlarmState API action or the set-alarm-state command in the AWS CLI can be used. This will temporarily change the alarm state to ALARM, which will initiate a notification to the Amazon SNS topic. 
Option A is incorrect as using third-party tools on Amazon EC2 instances to elevate CPU is not a suggested option to test CloudWatch alarms.
Option B is incorrect as this rule will check if CloudWatch alarms have at least one alarm action & will not perform alarm testing.
Option D is incorrect as this rule will check if CloudWatch alarms have specific settings & will not perform alarm testing.
For more information on testing Amazon CloudWatch Alarms, refer to the following URL,
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/AlarmThatSendsEmail.html