Management and Governance
CoreAmazon CloudWatch
Metrics, alarms, logs, dashboards, and observability signals for AWS resources and applications.
Key points
- Choose metrics tied to user and business outcomes as well as resource saturation.
- Alarms can trigger scaling or response actions, but thresholds and missing-data behavior must reflect the workload.
- Logs, metrics, and traces complement one another; retention and access must meet security and cost requirements.
Best-known use cases
- Alarm on availability or capacity risk.
- Scale workers or fleets from a workload-relevant signal.
What candidates often confuse it with
- CloudWatch shows operational behavior; CloudTrail records AWS API activity.
- CloudWatch provides metrics/logs; X-Ray traces distributed request paths.
Key takeaway
Choose CloudWatch for operational telemetry and alarms, then connect signals to an explicit action.
Related services
- AWS X-Ray
- AWS CloudTrail
- Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Relevant exam tasks
- D2.2
- D3.2