What is a key benefit of using Amazon CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch serves as a powerful monitoring service designed for AWS cloud resources and applications. Its primary function is to provide real-time data and analytics on resource utilization, operational performance, and overall system health. By continuously gathering metrics and log files, CloudWatch allows users to observe and respond to the performance of their AWS resources, such as EC2 instances, RDS databases, and more.

Monitoring resource utilization and performance can help identify trends, detect anomalies, and trigger alarms when specific thresholds are reached. This proactive approach enables organizations to maintain optimal performance, ensure reliability, and efficiently manage costs associated with their cloud infrastructure.

When evaluating the other options, data storage facilitation and automatic scaling of EC2 instances are not direct functions of CloudWatch. While CloudWatch provides insights that could inform scaling decisions, it does not perform the scaling itself. Additionally, increasing bandwidth is not a feature associated with CloudWatch, as bandwidth is typically managed at the network level and is not a primary concern of a monitoring tool. Thus, focus on monitoring resource utilization and performance accurately captures the essential benefit that CloudWatch offers.