SOA-C02 · Question #571
A company receives an alert from an Amazon CloudWatch alarm. The alarm indicates that a web application that is running on Amazon EC2 instances is not responding to requests. The EC2 instances have…
The correct answer is A. Use an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that includes the CloudWatch agent. Option A is correct because by default, CloudWatch does not collect OS-level metrics like memory utilization - the CloudWatch agent must be installed on EC2 instances to collect and publish custom metrics such as memory and disk usage. Using an AMI that pre-installs the…
Question
A company receives an alert from an Amazon CloudWatch alarm. The alarm indicates that a web application that is running on Amazon EC2 instances is not responding to requests. The EC2 instances have a Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system and are in an Auto Scaling group. The Auto Scaling group has a minimum capacity of 2 and a maximum capacity of 5. An investigation reveals that the web application is experiencing out-of-memory errors. The company adds memory to the web application and wants to track operating system memory utilization. A CloudWatch memory metric does not currently exist for the EC2 instances in the Auto Scaling group. What should a SysOps administrator do to provide a CloudWatch memory metric for the EC2 instances?
Options
- AUse an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that includes the CloudWatch agent.
- BTurn on CloudWatch detailed monitoring.
- CTurn on Instance Metadata Service Version 2 (IMDSv2).
- DUse an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that is based on Amazon Linux.
How the community answered
(40 responses)- A83% (33)
- B10% (4)
- C3% (1)
- D5% (2)
Explanation
Option A is correct because by default, CloudWatch does not collect OS-level metrics like memory utilization - the CloudWatch agent must be installed on EC2 instances to collect and publish custom metrics such as memory and disk usage. Using an AMI that pre-installs the CloudWatch agent ensures every instance launched by the Auto Scaling group (including scale-out instances) has the agent configured from the start, without manual intervention.
Option B (Detailed Monitoring) only increases the frequency of default EC2 metrics (e.g., CPU, network, disk I/O) from 5-minute to 1-minute intervals - it does not add new metric types like memory utilization.
Option C (IMDSv2) is a security feature controlling how instance metadata is accessed; it has no relationship to CloudWatch metric collection.
Option D (Amazon Linux AMI) is a distractor exploiting the fact that some AWS-optimized AMIs come with certain tools pre-installed, but the key requirement is the CloudWatch agent - not the specific Linux distribution. Red Hat Enterprise Linux with the CloudWatch agent works just as well as Amazon Linux.
Memory tip: Think of CloudWatch's default metrics as "hypervisor-visible" (CPU, network, disk I/O - things AWS can see from outside the VM). Anything inside the OS (memory, custom logs, swap) requires the CloudWatch agent installed on the instance itself. When you see Auto Scaling in the question, bake the agent into the AMI so every new instance automatically reports metrics.
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