Which AWS service can be configured to monitor your application’s health and performance?

AWS CloudWatch is designed specifically for monitoring applications and infrastructure in real-time. It offers comprehensive tools to collect and track metrics, collect log files, and set alarms. CloudWatch enables you to gain insights into your application’s performance by providing dashboards that visualize this data, helping identify trends and operational issues.

One of its key features is the ability to create custom metrics, which allows developers to gain deeper insights into application-specific performance indicators. Additionally, CloudWatch can integrate with various AWS services and applications to automatically monitor their health, alerting you when performance falls below defined thresholds.

Unlike other services, such as AWS CloudTrail, which focuses on logging AWS API calls for auditing purposes, or AWS Config, which tracks changes in configurations and compliance over time, CloudWatch is specifically tailored for real-time health and performance monitoring. AWS X-Ray serves a different purpose by providing insights into the performance of applications, particularly in the context of microservices, but it does not have the comprehensive monitoring capabilities of CloudWatch over the entire application's health and performance.