What benefit does AWS CloudWatch offer for system health?

AWS CloudWatch provides a critical benefit by enabling users to set alarms based on metric thresholds. This feature allows you to monitor the health and performance of your AWS resources and applications in real time. By configuring alarms, you can receive notifications when a specific metric exceeds or falls below a defined threshold, which helps in promptly identifying and responding to issues that may affect system health. This proactive monitoring capability is essential for maintaining operational excellence and ensuring that resources are performing as expected.

In contrast, while running machine learning models may be a feature of other AWS services, it is not a direct benefit associated with system health monitoring in CloudWatch. Automated data backups pertain more to data durability and recovery rather than real-time health monitoring. Multi-region availability refers to the ability of a service to operate across multiple geographic areas, which supports redundancy and disaster recovery but does not specifically address the monitoring of system health. Therefore, setting alarms based on metric thresholds directly aligns with the functionality intended for maintaining system health and performance within AWS environments.