DOP-C02 Monitoring and Logging 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 AWS Systems Manager Inventory to collect disk space data.

  Why it's wrong here

  AWS Systems Manager Inventory is a configuration auditing tool that captures snapshots of installed software, OS configuration, and file details on a schedule, storing them in Amazon S3 or a resource data sync. It does not publish continuous metrics to CloudWatch, nor does it calculate disk space utilization in real time, so you cannot use it to trigger CloudWatch alarms based on disk thresholds. It is useful for compliance and patch management, but it is not designed as a monitoring solution for evolving metrics like disk space.

• ✓

  Install the CloudWatch agent on the EC2 instances and configure the disk metric.

  Why this is correct

  The CloudWatch agent runs inside the guest OS and reads disk space metrics such as disk_used_percent, disk_free, and disk_used from the filesystem, then publishes them as custom metrics under the System/Linux namespace (or appropriate custom namespace) to CloudWatch. You configure the agent via the amazon-cloudwatch-agent-config.json file or AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store, and once installed it can deliver both default host metrics and in-guest disk metrics. This is the only option that actually exposes the guest-OS-level disk space data to CloudWatch, enabling you to create alarms and dashboards on values like available disk capacity.

• ✗

  Enable EC2 detailed monitoring in CloudWatch.

  Why it's wrong here

  EC2 detailed monitoring only changes the frequency of the hypervisor-level metrics that EC2 already generates, lowering the collection interval from 5 minutes to 1 minute at an additional per-instance cost. However, the metric set remains identical to basic monitoring—CPU utilization, network traffic, and disk I/O activity—none of which include the filesystem's free or used space. Disk space usage is a guest-OS concept, so unless an in-guest agent like the CloudWatch agent sends that data to CloudWatch, detailed monitoring cannot provide it.

• ✗

  Use EC2 basic monitoring in CloudWatch.

  Why it's wrong here

  EC2 basic monitoring is the default, providing a fixed set of host-level metrics at 5-minute intervals, including CPU utilization, network throughput, and disk read/write counts. These metrics are emitted from the hypervisor and do not include any logical disk space utilization, which exists only inside the operating system's filesystem. Because basic monitoring never looks into the guest OS, it cannot detect a full disk, leaving the team without the capacity monitoring they need.

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