SOA-C02 Question 38
Single answerYou are managing an application hosted on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). An Amazon CloudWatch alarm was triggered, indicating high CPU utilization on the EC2 instances for the past 15 minutes. Upon reviewing your environment, you notice no increase in incoming traffic through the ALB. What corrective action should you take to address the issue?
- A
Check the application logs on the EC2 instances to identify high CPU-consuming processes and resolve the issue.
- B
Increase the Auto Scaling group’s desired capacity to add more EC2 instances.
- C
Modify the ALB to route traffic to a different Availability Zone.
- D
Enable Elastic Load Balancing access logs to analyze traffic patterns.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
When a CloudWatch alarm indicates high CPU utilization on EC2 instances, and there is no corresponding increase in incoming traffic, the issue is likely related to the application or processes running on the instances. The most appropriate first step is to investigate the application logs to identify the root cause of the high CPU usage. Other actions, such as scaling the environment or analyzing traffic patterns, are not pertinent to resolving this specific issue.
- A. Correct.
Investigating the application logs on the EC2 instances is the correct first step to identify the root cause of high CPU utilization, especially since there’s no increase in traffic through the ALB. This will help pinpoint whether an application issue, such as a memory leak or inefficient code, is causing the problem.
- B. Incorrect.
Increasing the Auto Scaling group’s desired capacity would add more EC2 instances but does not address the root cause of the high CPU utilization, especially since there is no increase in incoming traffic.
- C. Incorrect.
Modifying the ALB to route traffic to a different Availability Zone is unnecessary in this scenario because the issue is not related to traffic distribution or availability.
- D. Incorrect.
Enabling Elastic Load Balancing access logs would provide details about traffic patterns but will not directly help resolve the high CPU utilization issue on the EC2 instances, as there is no evidence of increased traffic.