AWS Technical Essentials Practice

Amazon CloudWatch is the service designed specifically for monitoring AWS resources and applications. It provides real-time insights into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health through metrics, logs, and events. With CloudWatch, users can set up alarms to automatically react to changes in their systems, visualize metrics with dashboards, and gain insight into performance bottlenecks, enabling effective performance monitoring and management.

While AWS Config is focused on providing configuration history and compliance checking, it does not specifically facilitate the continuous monitoring of resource performance in the same dynamic and real-time manner. AWS CloudTrail is primarily concerned with logging and monitoring account activity and API usage for security and governance purposes, rather than performance monitoring. AWS IAM, on the other hand, is a service for managing access to AWS services and resources, and it does not provide monitoring capabilities.

Thus, Amazon CloudWatch stands out as the go-to solution for comprehensive monitoring of both AWS resources and applications, making it the correct choice in this context.