Option C best satisfies the requirements because it combines application-aware observability, metric baselining, anomaly detection, and correlated alerting using fully managed AWS services with minimal operational overhead. Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights is designed to automatically monitor application health by analyzing metrics, logs, and events across EC2-based workloads. This aligns directly with the need to detect intermittent performance issues and deviations from expected behavior.
By publishing custom metrics using the CloudWatch embedded metric format, the application can track generative AI–specific signals such as recommendation quality indicators, token usage, request volume, and response latency from Amazon Bedrock foundation model calls. Adding di mensions such as request type or user segment enables fine-grained visibility into which workloads or customer groups are impacted when recommendation quality degrades.
A critical requirement is detecting degradation compared to established baselines and generating alerts within 10 minutes. CloudWatch anomaly detection automatically builds statistical models of normal behavior for time-series metrics and flags deviations without requiring manually tuned thresholds. This capability is well suited for monitoring foundation model behavior, which can vary subtly over time. When anomalies are detected, CloudWatch alarms can trigger notifications with contextual metric data quickly, meeting the alerting requirement.
CloudWatch Logs Insights complements the metric-based view by enabling log pattern analysis and correlation. Engineers can query application logs and model response logs to identify recurring error patterns or shifts in output behavior that explain why recommendations no longer align with user preferences. Application Insights further correlates metrics and logs to surface probable root causes, reducing mean time to resolution.
The other options lack one or more critical elements. Option A focuses on infrastructure-level metrics without baseline anomaly detection. Option B emphasizes tracing and auditing but does not provide automated performance deviation analysis. Option D offers flexibility but requires significantly more development and operational effort than a native CloudWatch-based solution.