Detailed Monitoring for One-Minute EC2 Metrics and SNS Alerts
Short answer
D Enable detailed monitoring in CloudWatch for 1-minute instance metrics and configure CloudWatch alarms that publish to Amazon SNS email subscriptions.
Question
Which solution will meet these requirements?
Key Takeaways
The question tests the granularity difference between CloudWatch basic monitoring (5 minutes) and detailed monitoring (1 minute); the phrase "every minute" is the trap that disqualifies basic monitoring.
For an application on a highly available EC2 pair needing metrics collected every minute, CloudWatch detailed monitoring provides 1-minute granularity, and CloudWatch alarms paired with Amazon SNS deliver threshold-based email alerts—making option D the correct solution.
Common mistake: Option C is the tempting wrong answer: it has the correct alarm-and-SNS email design, but basic monitoring only collects metrics at 5-minute intervals, so it violates the every-minute requirement.
Expert Analysis
The deciding qualifier is "every minute." Amazon CloudWatch offers two granularity levels for EC2 instance metrics. Basic monitoring delivers data at 5-minute intervals at no additional charge, while detailed monitoring delivers data at 1-minute intervals (for a fee). Because the requirement explicitly states "collect instance metrics every minute," only detailed monitoring satisfies it.
Eliminating option C. Option C describes basic monitoring, whose finest granularity is 5 minutes, so it fails the every-minute requirement outright. The SNS-based alarm and email portion of C is correct, but the granularity portion is not, making C an incomplete solution.
Eliminating options A and B. Option A proposes the AWS Health Dashboard, which reports the health of AWS services and, for enterprise plans, affected resources—not per-instance performance metrics—and EventBridge cannot threshold numeric metric values the way CloudWatch alarms do. Option B proposes CloudTrail, which records API and account activity (management events, data events) for governance and forensics, not time-series performance metrics; plus a Lambda-on-S3-log pipeline introduces latency that cannot meet a one-minute cadence.
Why D is correct. D combines detailed monitoring in CloudWatch (1-minute metric collection for the EC2 pair) with CloudWatch alarms that publish to Amazon SNS, whose email subscription delivers the alert. This architecture satisfies both stated constraints—minute-level granularity and threshold-triggered email—so the answer is D.
Official Reference
- https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-cloudwatch-new.html
- https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/cloudwatch_concepts.html#Alarm
These links open the official vendor documentation in a new tab.
Exam Strategy
On AWS Associate-level questions, treat numeric time qualifiers such as "every minute" as hard constraints that map directly to a service tier—1 minute means detailed monitoring, 5 minutes means basic monitoring. Read the option as two halves (collection mechanism + alerting mechanism) and reject any option where either half is wrong; distractors often reuse the correct alerting half to look plausible.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do CloudWatch alarms send email alerts?
Discussion 1 contributions
Compiled from public community threads and reader submissions, lightly edited for clarity. Handles and vote tallies are shown as recorded, and comments reflect the views of individual contributors.
From public community threads 1
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testerhelper 👍 1 Answered DThe requirement to collect instance metrics every minute automatically tells us that we need detailed monitoring. Basic Monitoring only goes down to 5 mins.
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