The services from this week — CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Config, Systems Manager, X-Ray, Trusted Advisor, Health Dashboard — look at first glance like a miscellaneous collection of operational tools. But there's a question that threads them into one line. When something happens to a system, the questions an engineer throws out come down to four: "who did this (audit)," "what state is it in now (configuration / metrics)," "why is it slow or broken (tracing / logs)," and "is this my problem or an AWS problem (health)." Every service in Week 9 exists to answer one of these four questions, and the SAA exam relentlessly tests your ability to identify which of the four a scenario's