These questions are independently created for study purposes. They are not official AWS exam questions, actual exam questions, leaked questions, or exam dumps.
SAA-050
CPU utilization on your production EC2 instances has stayed below 10% for a long period, suggesting the specifications may be excessive. If you want candidate instance types to migrate to presented based on an analysis of actual usage, which service is the most appropriate?
Choices
Explanation and answer
Read the explanation and correct answer (spoiler — try answering first)
Correct answer: B. Enable AWS Compute Optimizer and review the recommended instance types based on utilization metrics
Explanation
AWS Compute Optimizer analyzes CloudWatch utilization metrics with machine learning and presents concrete recommended resource configurations, estimated savings, and performance risk for EC2 instances, Auto Scaling groups, EBS volumes, Lambda functions, and more. Presenting migration candidates is what matches the requirement.
Per-choice explanations
A. Collect custom metrics for memory utilization with Amazon CloudWatch and visualize them on a dashboard
Incorrect. Visualizing metrics helps you understand the current state, but there is no capability to judge and present appropriate instance types.
B. Enable AWS Compute Optimizer and review the recommended instance types based on utilization metrics
Correct. It can be enabled for free, and you can review the comparison between current and recommended configurations along with estimated cost savings.
C. Set an EC2 cost budget in AWS Budgets and receive notifications when the threshold is exceeded
Incorrect. AWS Budgets notifies you when a budget threshold is exceeded; it does not analyze which instances are oversized or propose migration targets.
D. Check the AWS Trusted Advisor "Low Utilization Amazon EC2 Instances" check
Incorrect. The Trusted Advisor cost optimization checks do detect low-utilization instances, but using them requires a Business or higher support plan, and recommending concrete migration target instance types based on utilization analysis is the domain of Compute Optimizer.
Practical Use
AWS Compute Optimizer analyzes resource utilization metrics collected by CloudWatch with machine learning and presents, for EC2 instances, EC2 Auto Scaling groups, EBS volumes, Lambda functions, ECS on Fargate services, commercial software licenses, and more, both whether the current configuration is over- or under-provisioned and the recommended migration target. Recommendations come with estimated cost savings and the performance risk of making the change, so you can judge right-sizing that does not sacrifice performance rather than simply moving to the cheapest type. Enabling it is free, and for EC2 the accuracy of recommendations improves if you send additional metrics such as memory utilization via the CloudWatch agent. Services related to cost optimization are divided into fine-grained roles and are easy to confuse. AWS Cost Explorer is a dashboard for visualizing and analyzing cost and usage trends, and it also provides Savings Plans and RI purchase recommendations as well as right-sizing recommendations. AWS Budgets is a mechanism that notifies you of actual or forecasted overruns against a budget threshold. AWS Trusted Advisor checks best practices in five areas — cost optimization, performance, security, fault tolerance, and service quotas — and has detection items such as "Low Utilization Amazon EC2 Instances," but a Business or higher support plan is required to use the cost optimization checks fully. Cost Anomaly Detection uses machine learning to detect spending patterns that differ from the norm. On SAA-C03, requirements such as "recommend appropriate instance types based on utilization" and "we want to right-size" make Compute Optimizer the correct answer. Distractors include Budgets (notification only), CloudWatch (visualization only), and Trusted Advisor (detects but does not present recommended types). Reading from the question which of detection, visualization, notification, or recommendation is being asked for is the key judgment axis in this area.