AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 837

A company is migrating to the cloud. It wants to evaluate the configurations of virtual machines in its existing data center environment to ensure that it can size new Amazon EC2 instances accurately. The company wants to collect metrics, such as CPU, memory, and disk utilization, and it needs an inventory of what processes are running on each instance. The company would also like to monitor network connections to map communications between servers.
Which would enable the collection of this data MOST cost effectively?

Answer options

• A. Use AWS Application Discovery Service and deploy the data collection agent to each virtual machine in the data center.
• B. Configure the Amazon CloudWatch agent on all servers within the local environment and publish metrics to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.
• C. Use AWS Application Discovery Service and enable agentless discovery in the existing virtualization environment.
• D. Enable AWS Application Discovery Service in the AWS Management Console and configure the corporate firewall to allow scans over a VPN.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

AWS Application Discovery Service agent-based discovery is required to collect OS-level details such as running processes and network dependencies, which are necessary for server mapping. Agentless discovery only captures VM configuration and basic utilization metrics, failing to provide process-level or network connection data. Using Amazon CloudWatch would incur significant data ingestion costs and lacks the native migration mapping capabilities of AWS Application Discovery Service.