AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 520

A SysOps Administrator is notified that an Amazon EC2 instance has stopped responding. The AWS Management Console indicates that the system checks are failing.
What should the SysOps Administrator do first to resolve this issue?

Answer options

• A. Reboot the EC2 instance so it can be launched on a new host.
• B. Stop and then start the EC2 instance so that it can be launched on a new host.
• C. Terminate the EC2 instance and relaunch it.
• D. View the AWS CloudTrail log to investigate what changed on the EC2 instance.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

A system status check failure indicates an issue with the underlying physical host of the Amazon EC2 instance. Stopping and starting an EBS-backed instance migrates it to a new, healthy physical host, which resolves this issue. Rebooting the instance keeps it on the same physical host, and checking AWS CloudTrail logs will not resolve a hardware-level failure.