AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate — Question 393

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?

Answer options

• A. Use an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that includes the CloudWatch agent.
• B. Turn on CloudWatch detailed monitoring.
• C. Turn on Instance Metadata Service Version 2 (IMDSv2).
• D. Use an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that is based on Amazon Linux.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Standard Amazon CloudWatch metrics only collect hypervisor-level data and do not include operating system-level metrics like memory utilization. To gather OS-level metrics, the CloudWatch agent must be installed and configured on the instances, which can be efficiently deployed at scale using an AMI that includes the agent. Detailed monitoring only increases the frequency of default hypervisor metrics, while IMDSv2 and Amazon Linux AMIs do not inherently publish memory metrics without the agent.