Which AWS service is used to collect and track metrics for resources and applications?

• A. Amazon CloudWatch
• B. Amazon CloudWatch Logs
• C. AWS Config
• D. AWS Health Dashboard

Answer: (A)

Monitoring and measuring the performance of AWS resources and applications is done with Amazon CloudWatch. It automatically collects standard metrics from AWS services (for example, EC2 CPUUtilization, RDS latency, S3 request metrics) and also lets you publish your own custom metrics from your applications. With CloudWatch you can create dashboards to visualize metrics, set alarms to alert you when thresholds are met, and even drive auto-scaling decisions based on those metrics. CloudWatch Logs handles log data, not metrics, though you can derive metrics from logs if needed. AWS Config tracks configuration history and changes, while AWS Health Dashboard shows service health events affecting your account. So CloudWatch is the right choice for collecting and tracking metrics.