DVA-C02 Troubleshooting and Optimization Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  Use Amazon CloudWatch Logs agent to capture application logs.

  Why it's wrong here

  The Amazon CloudWatch Logs agent is specifically designed to collect log files from EC2 instances and stream them to CloudWatch Logs for storage and analysis. While application logs might occasionally contain memory-related information if explicitly written by the application, the Logs agent itself does not directly collect system-level memory utilization metrics. Inferring precise memory usage from application logs would be an indirect, unreliable, and inefficient method compared to direct metric collection.

• ✗

  Use the EC2 instance metadata service to query memory usage.

  Why it's wrong here

  The EC2 instance metadata service provides information about the instance itself, such as its instance ID, public IP address, AMI ID, and security group assignments. This service offers static or semi-static configuration details and properties of the instance, not dynamic, real-time operating system-level metrics like CPU utilization, disk I/O, or memory usage. Therefore, the instance metadata service cannot be used to query or monitor memory utilization.

• ✓

  Install the CloudWatch agent on the EC2 instances to collect memory metrics and emit them to CloudWatch.

  Why this is correct

  The unified CloudWatch agent is the correct and recommended solution for collecting detailed operating system-level metrics, including memory utilization, from EC2 instances. This agent can be configured to gather various custom metrics, such as used memory percentage, free memory, and swap usage, directly from the instance's operating system. These collected metrics are then reliably published to CloudWatch, enabling comprehensive monitoring, alarming, and dashboarding capabilities.

• ✗

  Use AWS X-Ray to trace memory allocation.

  Why it's wrong here

  AWS X-Ray is a distributed tracing service primarily used to analyze and debug production applications by tracing requests as they flow through various services. It helps identify performance bottlenecks, latency issues, and errors across microservices and serverless applications. X-Ray is designed to provide insights into request paths and service interactions, not to monitor system-level resource utilization like memory allocation or overall memory usage on an EC2 instance.