Question

A SysOps administrator is investigating intermittent slowness on a production application running on a single EC2 instance backed by a General Purpose SSD (gp2) EBS volume. CloudWatch shows the instance's CPUUtilization is consistently below 40%, but users report the application stalls during peak hours. Which combination of EBS CloudWatch metrics should the administrator examine FIRST to confirm whether the volume is the bottleneck?

Accepted Answer

BurstBalance together with VolumeQueueLength to determine if I/O credits are exhausted and requests are queuing

Answer

VolumeReadOps and VolumeWriteOps only, comparing them against the instance's network throughput baseline

Answer

VolumeIdleTime and VolumeTotalReadTime to confirm the volume is under-provisioned for storage capacity

Answer

StatusCheckFailed_System and StatusCheckFailed_Instance to detect underlying hardware degradation