What is the primary function of the Amazon CloudWatch agent?

The primary function of the Amazon CloudWatch agent is to autonomously monitor and report system performance. This agent is designed to collect and transmit a wide array of metrics and logs from both Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances and on-premises servers. It provides visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health, allowing administrators to have comprehensive insight into the state of their systems.

By continuously gathering data such as CPU utilization, memory usage, disk activity, and network performance, it enables organizations to visualize performance metrics through the CloudWatch console, set alarms, and create automated responses based on performance thresholds. This monitoring capability is crucial for maintaining the efficiency and reliability of applications and services hosted within the AWS environment.