AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 557

A SysOps Administrator working on an Amazon EC2 instance has misconfigured the clock by one hour. The EC2 instance is sending data to Amazon CloudWatch through the CloudWatch agent. The timestamps on the logs are 45 minutes in the future.
What will be the result of this configuration?

Answer options

• A. Amazon CloudWatch will not capture the data because it is in the future.
• B. Amazon CloudWatch will accept the custom metric data and record it.
• C. The Amazon CloudWatch agent will check the Network Time Protocol (NTP) server before sending the data, and the agent will correct the time.
• D. The Amazon CloudWatch agent will check the Network Time Protocol (NTP) server, and the agent will not send the data because it is more than 30 minutes in the future.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Amazon CloudWatch allows you to publish metric data with timestamps up to 2 hours in the future and up to two weeks in the past. Since a 45-minute future offset falls well within this allowed window, CloudWatch will accept and record the metrics without issue. The CloudWatch agent itself does not query Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers to validate or modify timestamps before transmission.