Question #1053
A company uses AWS Business Support and wants to monitor the cost-effectiveness of Amazon EC2 instances across multiple AWS accounts. The EC2 instances are tagged with department, environment, and project. Development EC2 instances are incurring high costs despite low utilization. The company needs to automatically identify and terminate underutilized development instances. An instance is considered underutilized if it has 15% or less average daily CPU utilization and 10 MB or less network I/O for at least 5 of the past 14 days. Which solution meets these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?
Configure Amazon CloudWatch dashboards to monitor EC2 instance metrics filtered by department, environment, and project tags. Create an Amazon EventBridge rule that triggers an AWS Lambda function to terminate instances meeting the underutilization criteria.
Develop an AWS Lambda function that runs weekly to collect EC2 utilization metrics and store them in an Amazon RDS database. Use Amazon QuickSight to visualize the data and manually terminate underutilized development instances.
Use AWS Systems Manager to collect EC2 utilization data and send it to Amazon CloudWatch Logs. Create an EventBridge rule to trigger a Lambda function that filters by tags and terminates underutilized instances based on the logs.
Create an Amazon EventBridge rule to detect underutilized EC2 instances using AWS Trusted Advisor reports. Configure the rule to invoke an AWS Lambda function that filters instances by department, environment, and project tags and terminates qualifying development instances.
Explanation
Option D is correct because AWS Trusted Advisor's 'Underutilized Amazon EC2 Instances' check (included with Business Support) automatically evaluates CPU and network utilization over time, aligning with the question's criteria. EventBridge can monitor Trusted Advisor reports and trigger a Lambda function to terminate instances, eliminating the need to build custom metric collection or dashboards. Other options (A, B, C) require manual metric tracking, custom Lambda functions, or complex log parsing, resulting in higher operational overhead. Trusted Advisor simplifies compliance with AWS-managed checks, making D the most efficient solution.
Key Points:
- Trusted Advisor provides pre-configured underutilization checks.
- EventBridge integrates with Trusted Advisor reports for automated triggers.
- Business Support includes Trusted Advisor's advanced checks.
- Avoids custom metric setup, reducing maintenance.
Answer
The correct answer is: D