AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner / Question #1318 of 719

Question #1318

Which AWS service or feature can be used to monitor network throughput spikes on a system running on Amazon EC2?

A

AWS CloudTrail

B

AWS Health Dashboard

C

AWS Trusted Advisor

D

Amazon CloudWatch

Explanation

Amazon CloudWatch (D) is designed to monitor AWS resources and applications in real time. It collects metrics like CPU utilization, network throughput (NetworkIn/NetworkOut), and disk performance for EC2 instances. Network throughput spikes can be tracked using CloudWatch metrics and alarms.

Why other options are incorrect:
- A. AWS CloudTrail: Focuses on auditing API calls and user activity, not performance metrics.
- B. AWS Health Dashboard: Provides status updates on AWS service outages, not resource-level monitoring.
- C. AWS Trusted Advisor: Offers cost/security optimization recommendations, not real-time metric tracking.

Key Points:
- CloudWatch is AWS's primary monitoring tool for performance metrics.
- EC2 sends network metrics to CloudWatch by default (e.g., NetworkIn, NetworkOut).
- Use CloudWatch alarms/dashboards to detect and analyze throughput spikes.

Answer

The correct answer is: D