AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 582

Can you use CloudWatch to monitor memory and disk utilization usage for your Amazon EC2 Linux instances?

Answer options

• A. CloudWatch can only measure memory usage.
• B. CloudWatch can only collect memory and disk usage metrics when an instance is running.
• C. It is possible only on Linux EC2 instances using the CloudWatch Monitoring scripts for Linux.
• D. CloudWatch can only measure disk usage.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Standard Amazon CloudWatch metrics only monitor hypervisor-level data, which does not include OS-level metrics like memory or disk utilization. To collect these specific metrics from an Amazon EC2 Linux instance, you must install and run the CloudWatch Monitoring scripts (or the unified CloudWatch agent) within the guest operating system. Other options are incorrect because CloudWatch does not natively monitor these metrics without custom scripts/agents, regardless of the instance state.