What does AWS Config help you to achieve?

AWS Config is a service that provides detailed views of AWS resource configurations, enabling users to assess how resource configurations comply with desired configurations. With AWS Config, you can track changes to configurations over time and understand the relationships between resources. This helps in auditing, compliance, and security management by ensuring that resources are compliant with policies and best practices.

The ability to deliver a comprehensive history of resource configurations allows you to analyze misconfigurations, set up alerts for changes, and review the compliance of various resources against established standards. It provides a powerful tool for governance in a cloud environment by enabling visibility into resource setup and interactions.

In contrast, consolidating multiple accounts involves using AWS Organizations and other services, which is not a feature of AWS Config. Monitoring application performance is primarily handled by services such as Amazon CloudWatch, which focuses on performance metrics rather than configuration states. Management of data transfer also falls outside the scope of AWS Config, as it pertains more to networking services like AWS Direct Connect or Amazon Transfer Family, rather than the monitoring of resource configurations.