AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – AssociateDeployment, Provisioning, and AutomationEasy
A SysOps Administrator needs to collect custom application logs from Amazon EC2 instances and send them to Amazon CloudWatch Logs for centralized monitoring and analysis. The solution must be capable of collecting logs from various directories and dynamically handling new log files. Which AWS service component should be installed and configured on the EC2 instances to achieve this?
- AAWS CloudTrail
- BCloudWatch Agent
- CAWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent)
- DAmazon Kinesis Agent
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: B. CloudWatch Agent
The CloudWatch Agent is specifically designed to collect metrics and logs from EC2 instances and on-premises servers, sending them to CloudWatch Metrics and CloudWatch Logs respectively. It can be configured to monitor specific log files and directories.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. AWS CloudTrail records AWS API calls for auditing and governance, not application logs from EC2 instances.
- C. The SSM Agent is primarily for managing instances (running commands, patching, state management) and does not directly send application logs to CloudWatch Logs; it can be used to install/configure the CloudWatch Agent.
- D. Amazon Kinesis Agent is used to send data to Kinesis Data Streams, not directly to CloudWatch Logs.
CloudWatch Agent
The CloudWatch Agent is a unified agent for collecting system-level metrics and application logs from Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises servers, sending them to Amazon CloudWatch.
- Collects both metrics and logs.
- Supports various operating systems (Linux, Windows).
- Configurable via a JSON file to specify log sources and destinations.
Memory trick: The CloudWatch Agent is like a little *log-collecting cloud* on your EC2 instance.