PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
An SAP system on AWS is experiencing performance degradation. The SAP administrator wants to monitor the EC2 instance's CPU utilization and memory usage. Which AWS service should be used to collect memory metrics?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates assume CloudWatch default metrics include memory usage because it is a common monitoring need, but AWS intentionally excludes OS-level metrics from default collection to avoid overhead, requiring the CloudWatch Agent for such data.
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
✓
Amazon CloudWatch Agent
Amazon CloudWatch by default collects only basic metrics like CPU utilization, not memory usage. The Amazon CloudWatch Agent is required to collect custom metrics such as memory utilization from EC2 instances by sending data to CloudWatch via the PutMetricData API. This agent can be installed on the SAP EC2 instance to capture both CPU and memory metrics for performance monitoring.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Amazon CloudWatch (default metrics)
Why it's wrong here
Default CloudWatch metrics do not include memory utilization.
- ✗
AWS Systems Manager Inventory
Why it's wrong here
Inventory collects software and configuration data, not performance metrics.
- ✗
AWS Trusted Advisor
Why it's wrong here
AWS Trusted Advisor inspects AWS accounts against best-practice checks for cost optimisation, security, fault tolerance, and performance limits, but it does not ingest operating-system-level memory metrics from EC2 instances. It is tempting because its performance checks can highlight under-provisioned instances or idle resources, which might seem relevant to SAP degradation. However, Trusted Advisor would be correct only for evaluating service quotas or security configurations, not for collecting granular in-guest memory utilisation data.
- ✓
Amazon CloudWatch Agent
Why this is correct
The CloudWatch Agent can collect memory and disk metrics from EC2 instances.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PAS-C01 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 PAS-C01 exam.