Cloudwatch metrics

[Rumman]

In the following question

CSAA – Design Resilient Architectures

Your cloud architecture is composed of Linux and Windows EC2 instances which process high volumes of financial data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. To ensure the high availability of your systems, you are required to monitor the memory and disk utilization of all of your instances.

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

In the explanation of the wrong answer:

The option that says:

Use the default CloudWatch configuration to your EC2instances where the memory and disk utilization metrics are already available. Install the AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Agent to all of your 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.

In another question it was given

Category:

CSAA – Design High-Performing Architectures

The company that you are working for has a highly available architecture consisting of an elastic load balancer and several EC2 instances configured with auto-scaling in three availability Zones. You want to monitor your EC2 instances based on a particular metric, which is not readily available in CloudWatch.

Which of the following is a custom metric in CloudWatch which you have to manually setup?

Where the wrong answers are Network packets out of an EC2 instance, Disk Reads activity of an EC2 instance, CPU Utilization of an EC2 instance

and the correct answer is Memory Utilization of an EC2 instance

I am wondering by default without installing a cloudwatch agent is it possible to get any metrics from EC2 such as Network packets out of an EC2 instance, Disk Reads activity of an EC2 instance, CPU Utilization of an EC2 instance? Don’t we always have to install a cloudwatch agent to get data from EC2? In the explanation, it says CPU Utilization of an EC2 instance, Disk Reads activity of an EC2 instance, and Network packets out of an EC2 instance are all incorrect because these metrics are readily available in CloudWatch by default. Does it mean it is readily available after installing cloudwatch agent?

• This discussion was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by  Rumman. Reason: Clarification of the question
• This discussion was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by  Rumman.

[Gerome-TutorialsDojo]

Hello Rumman,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Remember that by default, CloudWatch doesn’t monitor memory usage but only the CPU utilization, Network utilization, Disk performance, and Disk Reads/Writes.

This is the reason why you have to install a CloudWatch agent in your EC2 instances to collect and monitor the custom metric (memory usage).

For more information about the metrics collected by the CloudWatch agent, you can click the link below.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/metrics-collected-by-CloudWatch-agent.html

Let us know if you need further assistance. The Tutorials Dojo team is dedicated to help you pass your AWS exam on your first try!

Regards,

Gerome @ Tutorials Dojo

[Rumman]

For monitoring CPU utilization, Network utilization, Disk performance, and Disk Reads/Writes can I do it without installing a cloudwatch agent in EC2?

[Gerome-TutorialsDojo]

Hello Rumman,

Thanks for the reply.

That’s correct. Here’s the list of available CloudWatch metrics.

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

Regards,

Gerome @ Tutorials Dojo

[Rumman]

Thanks Gerome, really appreciate your replies. And sorry for asking so many questions.