Maxim Brown explains that Amazon CloudWatch is an excellent starting point for monitoring EC2 instances and AWS services, but connecting it to Datadog provides a more detailed view of the entire infrastructure. The Datadog Agent collects additional system-level metrics from EC2 instances at 15-second resolution, including memory, disk latency, and others, and offers over 850 integrations with other systems for visualization and correlation. Datadog APM enables tracing requests through distributed services and cloud instances to troubleshoot bottlenecks in cloud applications. The Agent can be installed on instances to collect detailed metrics, and it also includes out-of-the-box support for log collection from AWS cloud services and popular technologies like Apache and Java. Datadog's Live Container view provides complete coverage of container fleets with metrics reported at two-second resolution, while Live Process monitoring offers visibility into all processes running across the entire distributed architecture. The integration allows users to create customizable dashboards on their Datadog dashboard list to visualize key metrics organized by instance resource usage, and it enables alerts for potential issues based on tags and events from AWS, allowing for precise scoping of alerts and dynamic monitoring.