A logistics company with 450 on-premises servers plans to migrate to AWS in six waves over nine months. Leadership needs a data-driven wave plan that groups applications by dependencies, business criticality, and migration complexity to avoid breaking freight tracking during cutover. What discovery approach creates this plan?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Would you move a warehouse without mapping what connects to what? You need live dependency maps to build safe waves. Discovery data shows which apps talk, so tracking never breaks mid-move.
Full Explanation
The correct approach works because AWS Application Discovery Service performs agent-based and agentless collection of server inventory, running processes, network connections, and performance data, whose discovered inventory and network dependency data feeds AWS Transform (the successor to Migration Hub, which closed to new customers on November 7, 2025) for dependency visualization and wave planning grouped by criticality and complexity, directly satisfying the need for data-driven sequencing over nine months while protecting freight tracking from cutover breaks. Interviewing owners to rank criticality and manually assign waves captures business context commonly used in portfolio assessment but fails as a discovery concept because subjective input without observed traffic cannot reveal hidden dependencies between 450 servers. Deploying CloudWatch agents to collect resource metrics provides valuable rightsizing telemetry routinely used for optimization but fails as a planning concept because CPU and memory load indicates performance, not application relationships, business importance, or migration complexity. Creating a Control Tower landing zone to organize accounts is best practice for secure multi-account foundations and compliance isolation but fails as a discovery concept because account provisioning does not map on-premises dependencies, and migrating freight tracking first risks outage without predecessor analysis. For exam purposes, remember to distinguish discovery and dependency mapping from monitoring for performance and from landing zone setup for governance, even when scenarios mention all three. As a practical check, review the dependency graph and wave grouping in AWS Transform for freight tracking neighbors and confirm with application owners before freezing each of the six waves.