AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 540

A company's website went down for several hours. The root cause was a full disk on one of the company's Amazon EC2 instances.
Which steps should the SysOps Administrator take to prevent this from happening in the future?

Answer options

• A. Configure Amazon CloudWatch Events to filter and forward AWS Health events for disk space utilization to an Amazon SNS topic to notify the Administrator.
• B. Create an AWS Lambda function to describe the volume status for each EC2 instance. Post a notification to an Amazon SNS topic when a volume status is impaired.
• C. Enable detailed monitoring for the EC2 instances. Create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm to notify the Administrator when disk space is running low.
• D. Use the Amazon CloudWatch agent on the EC2 instances to collect disk metrics. Create a CloudWatch alarm to notify the Administrator when disk space is running low.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Standard Amazon EC2 metrics provided by hypervisor monitoring do not include internal operating system metrics such as disk space utilization. Installing the Amazon CloudWatch agent on the EC2 instances is necessary to collect these custom OS-level metrics and send them to CloudWatch. Detailed monitoring only increases the frequency of default hypervisor metrics, while volume status checks and AWS Health events do not track specific file system disk capacity usage.