AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 716

A company has a web application that runs both on-premises and on Amazon EC2 instances. Over time, both the on-premises servers and EC2 instances begin crashing. A SysOps Administrator suspects a memory leak in the application and wants a unified method to monitor memory utilization over time.
How can the Administrator track both the EC2 memory utilization and on-premises server memory utilization over time?

Answer options

• A. Write a script or use a third-party application to report memory utilization for both EC2 instances and on-premises servers.
• B. Use Amazon CloudWatch agent for both Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises servers to report MemoryUtilization metrics to CloudWatch and set a CloudWatch alarm for notifications.
• C. Use CloudWatch agent for Amazon EC2 instances to report memory utilization to CloudWatch, and set CloudWatch alarms for notifications. Use a third-party application for the on-premises servers.
• D. Configure a load balancer to route traffic to both on-premises servers and EC2 instances, then use CloudWatch as the unified view of the metrics for the load balancer.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

The Amazon CloudWatch agent can be installed on both EC2 instances and hybrid on-premises servers to collect OS-level metrics like MemoryUtilization, providing a single pane of glass in CloudWatch. This allows the SysOps Administrator to easily configure unified CloudWatch alarms for both environments. Other options either introduce unnecessary third-party tools or rely on load balancer metrics, which cannot measure host-level memory consumption.