A developer has a legacy on-premises application that other AWS-hosted apps depend on. The developer wants to monitor and troubleshoot all applications from a single place using Amazon CloudWatch. How can the developer send logs from the on-premises server to CloudWatch?

The CloudWatch agent is designed to collect metrics and logs from on-premises servers and send them to CloudWatch. It supports various operating systems and can be configured to use IAM user credentials for secure authentication and authorization, ensuring logs are sent to the correct CloudWatch Logs log group. Installing an AWS SDK would allow programmatic interaction with AWS services, but it doesn't automatically send logs. The developer would still need to write custom code to push logs, which is less efficient than using the dedicated CloudWatch agent. Uploading log files to S3 and then having CloudWatch read them is a multi-step, less real-time process. CloudWatch Logs is designed for direct log ingestion. Transferring logs to an EC2 instance to forward them adds unnecessary latency, complexity, and cost compared to direct ingestion via the CloudWatch agent.