The CloudWatch tools covered in Week 3 are independent of each other, but in actual operations, they form one observability pipeline. When an Alarm detects "something went wrong," the Dashboard shows "what range and how much," Agent lets you "look inside the guest OS," Synthetics maintains the "user perspective," and X-Ray traces "which service's which call" is the cause. When this pipeline works perfectly together, MTTD/MTTK (Mean Time To Know) from incident detection to root cause analysis shrinks.
Today we re-examine how these five tools actually connect structurally, organize each tool's internal design principles in comparison tables, and solve the 10 most frequent exam scenarios.