What does the Amazon CloudWatch agent do?

The Amazon CloudWatch agent is designed to run continuously on your servers, gathering and sending system-level metrics and logs to Amazon CloudWatch. This continuous operation allows it to monitor various aspects of an operating system, including CPU usage, memory consumption, disk space, and network activity. By collecting this data in real time, the CloudWatch agent plays a crucial role in enabling users to understand the performance and health of their applications and infrastructure.

In contrast, the other options do not accurately describe the primary function of the CloudWatch agent. Automated backup solutions pertain more closely to services like AWS Backup or Amazon S3 for data storage, while managing cloud resources across multiple accounts is generally handled by tools like AWS Organizations. Finally, database instance management typically involves services like Amazon RDS or AWS Aurora, rather than the role of the CloudWatch agent.