Question

A CloudOps engineer is building a capacity-planning dashboard that compares EC2 CPU utilization trends over the past 12 months. When querying CloudWatch, the engineer notices that metric data older than 63 days appears aggregated to 1-hour granularity, and data older than 15 months is unavailable. The team wants to retain granular historical metrics for multi-year trend analysis without changing this CloudWatch behavior. What is the MOST appropriate approach?

Accepted Answer

Use the CloudWatch GetMetricData API on a schedule to export metrics to Amazon S3 and analyze long-term trends with Amazon Athena.

Answer

Enable detailed monitoring on all EC2 instances to extend CloudWatch metric retention beyond 15 months.

Answer

Create a CloudWatch dashboard with a 1-second period widget to force CloudWatch to store high-resolution data for years.

Answer

Increase the log retention setting in CloudWatch Logs to keep the EC2 metrics indefinitely.