Management and Governance
CoreAmazon CloudWatch
Performance evidence, monitoring, alerts, and operational diagnosis.
Key points
- CloudWatch collects metrics and supports alarms for throughput, errors, latency, lag, and resource utilization.
- An alarm detects a symptom; logs, traces, job history, and data evidence are still needed for root-cause analysis.
Best-known use cases
- Monitor pipeline throughput, errors, latency, and resource utilization.
- Alarm when job or data-flow metrics cross operational thresholds.
What candidates often confuse it with
- CloudWatch metrics show time-series health; CloudWatch Logs holds event detail and CloudTrail records API activity.
Key takeaway
Choose CloudWatch metrics and alarms to detect operational conditions and route owned responses.
Relevant exam tasks
- D1.2 — Task 1.2: Transform and process data
- 1.2.7 — Troubleshoot and debug common transformation failures and performance issues.
- D3.3 — Task 3.3: Maintain and monitor data pipelines
- 3.3.2 — Deploy logging and monitoring solutions to facilitate auditing and traceability.
- 3.3.3 — Use notifications during monitoring to send alerts.
- 3.3.4 — Troubleshoot performance issues.
- 3.3.6 — Troubleshoot and maintain pipelines (for example, AWS Glue, Amazon EMR).
- 3.3.7 — Use Amazon CloudWatch Logs to log application data (with a focus on configuration and automation).