Collecting Server Information: Easy Configuration Management for EC2 Instances and On-Premises Servers

Collecting Server Information

Question

Your company has a set of EC2 Instances and also servers in their on-premises environment.

The configuration management team wants to collect information on these servers, such as the softwares installed.

For that, they can record it in their configuration management database.

How could you achieve this in the easiest way possible?

Answers

Explanations

Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer

A. B. C. D.

Correct Answer: B.

The AWS Documentation mentions the following.

You can use AWS Systems Manager Inventory to collect operating system (OS), application, and instance metadata from your Amazon EC2 instances and your on-premises servers or virtual machines (VMs) in your hybrid environment.

You can query the metadata to quickly understand which instances are running the software and configurations required by your software policy, and which instances need to be updated.

Option A is incorrect because this can check for the configuration changes in resources, but not get information on the actual software installed on the servers.

Option C is incorrect because the dashboard does not have this information available.

Option D is incorrect because you can get logs and metrics from Cloudwatch but not get the list of software installed.

For more information on the Systems Manager inventory, please refer to the below URL-

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide/systems-manager-inventory.html

The easiest way to collect information on the software installed on EC2 instances and on-premises servers is to use AWS Systems Manager. AWS Systems Manager provides a unified user interface that enables you to view and control your infrastructure on AWS and on-premises.

Option A, using AWS Config, is a service that provides a detailed view of the configuration of resources in an AWS account. While AWS Config can provide some information about the EC2 instances, it is not designed to collect detailed software inventory data.

Option C, using the EC2 dashboard, provides basic information about the EC2 instances but does not provide software inventory data.

Option D, using Amazon CloudWatch, is a monitoring service for AWS resources and applications. CloudWatch does not provide the ability to collect software inventory data.

Therefore, the correct answer is B, using AWS Systems Manager to get the software inventory on the servers. AWS Systems Manager provides a simple way to collect software inventory data from both EC2 instances and on-premises servers. With Systems Manager, you can automate the collection of inventory data, view it in a central location, and export it to a database or other systems.