What is the primary function of Amazon CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch is primarily designed for monitoring AWS resources and services, making it essential for maintaining the performance and reliability of applications running in the cloud. It provides operational visibility by collecting and tracking metrics, logging events, and offering alarms based on specified thresholds. This allows users to understand the health of their AWS environment in real-time, enabling proactive management and troubleshooting of issues.

With CloudWatch, organizations can gain insights into various performance indicators across different services, such as EC2 instance CPU usage, RDS instance latency, and Lambda function execution durations. This monitoring capability helps in making informed decisions about scaling resources, optimizing performance, and ensuring application reliability.

By focusing on this monitoring aspect, CloudWatch aids in automating responses to changes in operational status, thereby enhancing the overall efficiency and reliability of cloud applications.