Which of the following is the most suitable monitoring solution to implement?

A company has a cloud architecture that is composed of Linux and Windows EC2 instances that process high volumes of financial data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. To ensure high availability of the systems, the Solutions Architect needs to create a solution that allows them to monitor the memory and disk utilization metrics of all the instances.

Which of the following is the most suitable monitoring solution to implement?
A . Use the default CloudWatch configuration to EC2 instances where the memory and disk utilization metrics are already available. Install the AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Agent to all the EC2 instances.
B . Install the CloudWatch agent to all the EC2 instances that gathers the memory and disk utilization data. View the custom metrics in the Amazon CloudWatch console.
C . Use Amazon Inspector and install the Inspector agent to all EC2 instances.
D . Enable the Enhanced Monitoring option in EC2 and install CloudWatch agent to all the EC2
instances to be able to view the memory and disk utilization in the CloudWatch dashboard.

View Answer

Answer: B

Explanation:

Amazon CloudWatch has available Amazon EC2 Metrics for you to use for monitoring CPU utilization,

Network utilization, Disk performance, and Disk Reads/Writes. In case you need to monitor the below

items, you need to prepare a custom metric using a Perl or other shell script, as there are no ready to

use metrics for:

Memory utilization

Disk swap utilization

Disk space utilization

Page file utilization

Log collection

Take note that there is a multi-platform CloudWatch agent which can be installed on both Linux and Windows-based instances. You can use a single agent to collect both system metrics and log files from Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises servers. This agent supports both Windows Server and Linux and enables you to select the metrics to be collected, including sub-resource metrics such as per-CPU core. It is recommended that you use the new agent instead of the older monitoring scripts to collect metrics and logs.

Hence, the correct answer is: Install the CloudWatch agent to all the EC2 instances that gathers the memory and disk utilization data. View the custom metrics in the Amazon CloudWatch console.

The option that says: Use the default CloudWatch configuration to EC2 instances where the memory and disk utilization metrics are already available. Install the AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Agent to all the EC2 instances is incorrect because, by default, CloudWatch does not automatically provide memory and disk utilization metrics of your instances. You have to set up custom CloudWatch metrics to monitor the memory, disk swap, disk space, and page file utilization of your instances.

The option that says: Enable the Enhanced Monitoring option in EC2 and install CloudWatch agent to all the EC2 instances to be able to view the memory and disk utilization in the CloudWatch dashboard is incorrect because Enhanced Monitoring is a feature of Amazon RDS. By default, Enhanced Monitoring metrics are stored for 30 days in the CloudWatch Logs.

The option that says: Use Amazon Inspector and install the Inspector agent to all EC2 instances is

incorrect because Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps you test

the network accessibility of your Amazon EC2 instances and the security state of your applications

running on the instances. It does not provide a custom metric to track the memory and disk utilization of

each and every EC2 instance in your VPC.

References:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/monitoring_ec2.html

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/mon-scripts.html#using_put_script

Check out this Amazon CloudWatch Cheat Sheet:

https://tutorialsdojo.com/amazon-cloudwatch/

CloudWatch Agent vs SSM Agent vs Custom Daemon Scripts: https://tutorialsdojo.com/cloudwatch-agent-vs-ssm-agent-vs-custom-daemon-scripts/ Comparison of AWS Services Cheat Sheets: https://tutorialsdojo.com/comparison-of-aws-services/