AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 636

A company has developed a new memory-intensive application that is deployed to a large Amazon EC2 Linux fleet. The company is concerned about potential memory exhaustion, so the development team wants to monitor memory usage by using Amazon CloudWatch.
What is the MOST operationally efficient way to accomplish this goal?

Answer options

• A. Create an AWS Lambda function to capture memory utilization of the EC2 instances. Schedule the Lambda function with Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events).
• B. Deploy the application to memory optimized EC2 instances. Use the CloudWatch MemoryUtilization metric.
• C. Install the CloudWatch agent on the EC2 instances to collect and send metrics to CloudWatch.
• D. Install the CloudWatch monitoring scripts on the EC2 instances to collect and send metrics to CloudWatch.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Because memory utilization is an operating system-level metric, it is not collected by default by Amazon EC2's standard CloudWatch metrics, making Option B incorrect. Implementing the CloudWatch monitoring scripts on the Linux instances provides a direct, low-overhead way to capture internal OS metrics like memory usage and push them to CloudWatch. While the newer CloudWatch Agent is also an option, the monitoring scripts represent a proven, lightweight, and operationally efficient solution for legacy and specific Linux configurations.