A CloudOps team is managing a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances running a legacy Java application. The team needs to monitor the memory utilization of these instances to right-size the fleet. However, the default Amazon CloudWatch metrics do not provide this data. Which action should the team take to collect this specific metric?
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: B
By default, Amazon EC2 sends metrics to CloudWatch for CPU, disk I/O, and network, but not memory. To collect memory utilization, the unified CloudWatch agent must be installed and configured on the instances to push custom metrics to CloudWatch.
Question 2
A financial institution requires a complex monitoring setup for their transaction processing system. They need to trigger an automated remediation workflow only when three distinct conditions are met simultaneously: High CPU on the web tier, High Database Connections on the RDS tier, and High Latency on the Application Load Balancer. Which CloudWatch feature should be used to minimize noise and trigger the workflow only when all conditions are true?
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: C
CloudWatch Composite Alarms allow you to combine multiple metric alarms using boolean logic (AND, OR, NOT). This ensures that the action is only taken when the specific combination of conditions is met, reducing alarm fatigue and ensuring precise remediation triggers.
graph TD
A[CPU Alarm] --> D{Composite Alarm}
B[DB Conn Alarm] --> D
C[Latency Alarm] --> D
D -->|AND Condition Met| E[Trigger Remediation]
Question 3
An organization manages multiple AWS accounts using AWS Organizations. The Operations Manager wants a single pane of glass to view critical metrics from all member accounts in the management account. What is the most efficient way to achieve this?
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
CloudWatch cross-account observability allows a monitoring account to view metrics, logs, and traces from multiple source accounts. By setting up the link, the management account can display widgets from member accounts on a single dashboard without complex role assumption scripts.
Question 4
A serverless application using AWS Lambda is experiencing intermittent high latency. To troubleshoot the issue, the CloudOps engineer needs to visualize the service map and identify the specific segment causing the bottleneck. Which service should be enabled and configured?
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: B
AWS X-Ray helps developers and engineers analyze and debug distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. It provides a service map and trace view to identify performance bottlenecks and latency issues in Lambda functions.
Question 5
An e-commerce database running on Amazon EC2 is using 1 TB General Purpose SSD (gp2) EBS volumes. The database is hitting the IOPS limit of the volume, causing performance degradation. The team wants to increase performance without increasing the volume size or migrating to Provisioned IOPS (io1/io2) if possible to keep costs low. What is the BEST course of action?
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
gp3 volumes allow you to provision IOPS and throughput independently of storage capacity. Unlike gp2, where IOPS are tied to size (3 IOPS/GB), gp3 delivers a baseline of 3,000 IOPS and allows scaling up to 16,000 IOPS without increasing the volume size, often at a lower cost.
Question 6
Multiple answers
A media company needs to upload 500 GB video files from on-premises locations in Europe and Asia to an S3 bucket in the us-east-1 Region. The uploads are currently slow and frequently fail due to network instability. The solution must maximize upload speed and reliability over the public internet. Which combination of strategies should be implemented? (Select TWO)
Answer and explanation
Correct answers: A, C
S3 Transfer Acceleration uses AWS Edge Locations to route data over the optimized AWS global network instead of the public internet, significantly improving speed for long-distance transfers. Multipart uploads allow large files to be broken into chunks, improving throughput and reliability by allowing retries of individual failed parts.
Multipart upload is recommended for files larger than 100 MB and required for files larger than 5 GB. It improves throughput by uploading parts in parallel.
Question 7
An Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database is experiencing intermittent spikes in CPU utilization that correlate with slow application response times. The CloudOps engineer needs to identify the exact SQL queries causing the load. Which tool provides this level of granularity?
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: B
Amazon RDS Performance Insights is a database performance tuning and monitoring feature that helps you quickly assess the load on your database. It visualizes the database load and filters it by waits, SQL statements, hosts, or users, allowing you to pinpoint the specific queries causing high CPU.
Question 8
A fleet of EC2 instances occasionally becomes unresponsive due to a memory leak in a background agent. The operations team manually SSHs into instances to restart the service. They want to automate this remediation using a standard AWS tool without maintaining custom Lambda code. Which solution fits best?
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
AWS Systems Manager Run Command allows you to remotely and securely manage the configuration of your managed instances. It is the standard, managed way to run scripts (like service restarts) on instances without SSH.
