DOP-C02 Incident and Event Response Practice Question
A DevOps engineer is troubleshooting an issue where an EC2 instance running a web application becomes unresponsive every few hours. CloudWatch logs show no application errors, but the instance's status checks are passing. The engineer suspects a memory leak. Which AWS service can be used to capture memory utilization metrics at a granular level to confirm the leak?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
CloudWatch Agent
The CloudWatch Agent can be installed on EC2 instances to collect custom metrics such as memory usage and send them to CloudWatch, allowing granular monitoring. Option A is incorrect because EC2 Status Checks only verify system status (e.g., network reachability). Option B is incorrect because AWS Config tracks configuration changes, not performance metrics. Option C is incorrect because CloudTrail records API activity, not system metrics.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
EC2 Status Checks
Why it's wrong here
Amazon EC2 Status Checks are automated checks that run on every instance and report either system status (loss of power, network connectivity, or hardware issues that require AWS to repair) or instance status (misconfigured OS, networking, or corrupted file system). They provide a boolean pass/fail reachability signal, not numeric performance counters such as memory utilization, so they cannot diagnose an out-of-memory condition. Even when the instance is running and all status checks pass, the guest OS memory can be exhausted.
- ✗
AWS Config
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config is a configuration tracking and compliance service that records resource configuration items, configuration history, and configuration snapshots, and evaluates those configurations against rules you define (e.g., 'should EBS volumes be encrypted'). It detects changes in the state of a resource — like an instance type modification or a security group change — but it never samples runtime metrics from inside an EC2 instance. Memory utilization is a dynamic operating-system-level metric, not a configuration attribute, so AWS Config has no data path to capture it.
- ✗
AWS CloudTrail
Why it's wrong here
AWS CloudTrail is an auditing service that logs API activity in your AWS account, capturing who made a call, from which IP address, when, and what the API request/response looked like. It is designed for security investigation, compliance, and operational troubleshooting of control-plane actions (like RunInstances or TerminateInstances), not for collecting time-series performance data from within an instance. Memory utilization is not an API event; it is a guest-OS metric generated continuously, so CloudTrail would never contain a memory utilization reading.
- ✓
CloudWatch Agent
Why this is correct
The unified CloudWatch Agent is the correct solution because it runs as a service on your EC2 instance and reads guest-OS metrics directly from /proc and the operating system, allowing it to report memory utilization as a custom metric to CloudWatch. You can install and configure it via the command line, SSM Run Command, or an AWS-supplied recipe, and attach an IAM role with `cloudwatch:PutMetricData` permissions. It also supports collecting disk usage, CPU per-core statistics, and logs, all of which are invisible to hypervisor-level default EC2 metrics.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DOP-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the DOP-C02 exam.