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SOA-C03 · Question #167

A company uses memory-optimized Amazon EC2 instances behind a Network Load Balancer (NLB) to run an application. The company launched the EC2 instances from an AWS-provided Red Hat Enterprise Linux (R

The correct answer is C. Configure basic monitoring for the EC2 instances. Configure the Amazon CloudWatch agent on. EC2 does not publish RAM utilization as a native CloudWatch metric by default. Memory metrics such as mem_used_percent are typically collected by the CloudWatch Agent, which runs on the instance and publishes custom metrics to CloudWatch. Because the requirement is RAM utilizatio

Submitted by yaw92· Mar 5, 2026Monitoring, logging, and remediation

Question

A company uses memory-optimized Amazon EC2 instances behind a Network Load Balancer (NLB) to run an application. The company launched the EC2 instances from an AWS-provided Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) AMI. A CloudOps engineer must monitor RAM utilization in 5-minute intervals. The CloudOps engineer must ensure that the EC2 instances scale in and out appropriately based on incoming load. Which solution will meet these requirements?

Options

  • AConfigure detailed monitoring for the EC2 instances. Configure the Amazon CloudWatch agent
  • BConfigure detailed monitoring for the EC2 instances. Use the mem_used_percent metric that the
  • CConfigure basic monitoring for the EC2 instances. Configure the Amazon CloudWatch agent on
  • DConfigure basic monitoring for the EC2 instances. Use the standard mem_used_percent metric

How the community answered

(29 responses)
  • A
    3% (1)
  • B
    7% (2)
  • C
    72% (21)
  • D
    17% (5)

Explanation

EC2 does not publish RAM utilization as a native CloudWatch metric by default. Memory metrics such as mem_used_percent are typically collected by the CloudWatch Agent, which runs on the instance and publishes custom metrics to CloudWatch. Because the requirement is RAM utilization at 5-minute intervals, the CloudWatch Agent can be configured to emit metrics at that cadence (or faster). "Detailed monitoring" for EC2 mainly affects EC2-provided metrics (like CPU) by changing the period from 5 minutes (basic) to 1 minute (detailed). It does not magically provide memory utilization. Therefore, the key requirement is installing/configuring the CloudWatch Agent and ensuring it has permissions to publish metrics (via an IAM role attached to the instance / instance Option C correctly combines: (1) basic monitoring (fine for the ask), (2) CloudWatch Agent to publish mem_used_percent, (3) IAM role permissions to allow publishing, and (4) Auto Scaling policy that scales based on the memory metric. Option B incorrectly implies detailed monitoring provides mem_used_percent (it does not). Option D assumes a "standard" memory metric exists without the agent, which is not correct. Option A standard memory measurements for scaling policies, and also omits the IAM role requirement needed for publishing custom metrics. Thus, C is the AWS-correct path for memory-based scaling using CloudWatch custom metrics.

Topics

#CloudWatch agent#RAM utilization#custom metrics#EC2 auto scaling

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