AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 899

A SysOps Administrator has an AWS Lambda function that stops all Amazon EC2 instances in a test environment at night and on the weekend. Stopping instances causes some servers to become corrupt due to the nature of the applications running on them.
What can the SysOps Administrator use to identify these EC2 instances?

Answer options

• A. AWS Config
• B. Amazon EC2 termination protection
• C. Resource tagging
• D. Amazon CloudWatch

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Amazon CloudWatch can monitor EC2 status checks, such as StatusCheckFailed_System and StatusCheckFailed_Instance, to detect instances that fail to start properly or become corrupted after a reboot cycle. AWS Config is designed for tracking configuration changes and compliance rather than active operational health, and termination protection only prevents accidental instance deletion. Resource tagging is used for metadata organization and categorization, but it cannot actively detect or identify corrupted instances.