Troubleshooting Network Issues with EC2 Instances
Question
Your company has an EC2 Instance hosted in AWS.
This EC2 Instance hosts an application.
Currently this application is experiencing a number of issues.
You need to inspect the network packets to see what the type of error that is occurring? Which one of the below steps can help address this issue.
Answers
Explanations
Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer
A. B. C. D.Answer - B.
Since here you need to sniff the actual network packets , the ideal approach would be to use a network monitoring tool provided by an AWS partner.
The AWS documentation mentions the following.
Multiple AWS Partner Network members offer virtual firewall appliances that can be deployed as an in-line gateway for inbound or outbound network traffic.
Firewall appliances provide additional application-level filtering, deep packet inspection, IPS/IDS, and network threat protection features.
For more information on the security capabilities, please visit the below URL:
https://aws.amazon.com/answers/networking/vpc-security-capabilities/Out of the given options, the most appropriate solution to inspect network packets for an EC2 instance hosted application in AWS is using VPC Flow Logs.
VPC Flow Logs is a feature provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that captures metadata about the IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in your VPC. This information is logged to Amazon CloudWatch Logs or an Amazon S3 bucket for further analysis. By using VPC Flow Logs, you can monitor and troubleshoot traffic to identify network issues, investigate security incidents, and improve network performance.
VPC Flow Logs capture metadata such as source and destination IP addresses, source and destination ports, packet size, protocol, and start and end time for each flow. This information can help identify which packets are being dropped, which ports are being used, and how much traffic is flowing to and from an EC2 instance.
Using a network monitoring tool provided by an AWS partner (Option B) is also a viable solution but it may incur additional costs, and may require additional setup time.
Using another instance and setting up a port to "promiscuous mode" and sniffing the traffic to analyze the packets (Option C) is not an optimal solution because it requires a significant amount of setup time and may disrupt the normal operation of the EC2 instance.
CloudWatch Metrics (Option D) is used to monitor various resources in AWS and provides visibility into resource utilization, but it does not capture packet level information and is not suitable for inspecting network packets.
Therefore, the correct answer is Option A - Use VPC Flow Logs to inspect network packets.
