AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – AssociateMonitoring, Logging, and RemediationEasy
A SysOps administrator needs to monitor the CPU utilization of an EC2 instance and automatically perform an action if it consistently exceeds 80% for five consecutive minutes. The action should involve stopping the instance to prevent runaway costs from over-provisioning. Which AWS service combination should be used to achieve this?
- AAmazon CloudWatch Logs and AWS Lambda
- BAmazon CloudWatch and Amazon SNS
- CAmazon CloudWatch and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
- DAWS Systems Manager and Amazon EventBridge
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: C. Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Amazon CloudWatch is used to monitor metrics like CPU utilization and create alarms. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling can be configured to respond to CloudWatch alarms, including stopping instances, which helps manage costs and performance.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. CloudWatch Logs aggregates logs, and Lambda can process events, but this combination isn't designed for automated instance state changes based on metric thresholds.
- B. SNS is a notification service. While CloudWatch can send notifications via SNS, it doesn't directly stop an EC2 instance based on a metric threshold.
- D. Systems Manager manages instances, and EventBridge routes events, but neither directly provides metric-based instance scaling or stopping capabilities in this simple setup.
CloudWatch Alarms with Auto Scaling
CloudWatch Alarms monitor AWS resources and metrics, triggering actions when a threshold is breached. EC2 Auto Scaling can be configured to perform actions like stopping, starting, or terminating instances in response to these alarms.
- CloudWatch monitors metrics and creates alarms.
- Auto Scaling groups can respond to CloudWatch alarms.
- Actions can include stopping, starting, or scaling instances.
Memory trick: Cloudy Watchers Scale Automatically to Stop runaway costs.