Final answer:
Amazon CloudWatch provides monitoring data including metrics, logs, and events from AWS resources like EC2 instances, DynamoDB tables, and RDS DB instances. It enables you to monitor applications, optimize resources, and set alarms for threshold breaches that can trigger automated actions.
Step-by-step explanation:
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service provided by AWS (Amazon Web Services) that gives you data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, understand and respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health.
CloudWatch provides data in the form of metrics, logs, and events, that is generated by AWS resources, such as EC2 instances, DynamoDB tables, and RDS DB instances. It offers a robust system to track resource usage, system performance, and application health.
This monitoring data includes information about the utilization of CPU, disk, and network, as well as custom metrics generated by your own applications.
With CloudWatch, you can set alarms to notify you of certain thresholds being breached, or even automatically make changes to the resources you are monitoring, based on the rules you define. For example, you can set an alarm for high CPU utilization on an EC2 instance, and have CloudWatch automatically increase the instance size or spawn additional instances if needed.