These questions are independently created for study purposes. They are not official AWS exam questions, actual exam questions, leaked questions, or exam dumps.
CLF-047
Which monitoring service handles metrics, logs, and alarms for AWS resources and applications?
Choices
Explanation and answer
Read the explanation and correct answer (spoiler — try answering first)
Correct answer: A. Amazon CloudWatch
Explanation
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service that handles metrics, logs, and alarms for AWS resources and applications. It is also used to view Lambda logs and monitor metrics.
Per-choice explanations
A. Amazon CloudWatch
Correct. CloudWatch is used for metrics, logs, and alarms.
B. Amazon SQS
SQS is a message queue service.
C. AWS Config
AWS Config is a service that lets you review the history of resource configurations and their compliance status.
D. AWS CloudTrail
CloudTrail records API call history. Take care not to confuse this with monitoring logs.
Practical Use
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service that handles, in an integrated way, the metrics, logs, events, and alarms for AWS resources and the applications that run on them. Standard metrics such as Amazon EC2 CPU utilization, Elastic Load Balancing request counts, and Amazon RDS connection counts, along with AWS Lambda execution logs and custom metrics emitted by applications, can all be collected in CloudWatch. A common pattern is to use CloudWatch Alarms to trigger Amazon SNS notifications or Auto Scaling actions when a threshold is breached. On the exam, CloudWatch is the expected answer for the prompt asking which monitoring service handles metrics, logs, and alarms for AWS resources. Common distractors include AWS CloudTrail (API call auditing), AWS Config (resource configuration change history and compliance evaluation), and Amazon SQS (message queue). CloudTrail, Config, and CloudWatch differ in "what they record," and CLF-C02 repeatedly asks about the difference in coverage among these three services. In practice, the basic pattern is a three-layer setup: CloudWatch Logs aggregates application logs from AWS Lambda, Amazon ECS, and Amazon EC2; CloudWatch Metrics accumulates time-series metrics; and CloudWatch Alarms detects threshold violations. The observability features needed for operations, such as CloudWatch Logs Insights for querying logs, CloudWatch Dashboards for metric visualization, and CloudWatch Synthetics for synthetic monitoring, are consolidated in a single service. Remembering CloudTrail as "who called which API (audit log)," Config as "how resource configurations changed and whether they comply with rules," and CloudWatch as "the operational state of resources and applications" helps you avoid wrong answers.