DVA-C02 Question 369
Single answerYour team is developing a serverless application using AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and DynamoDB. During a recent production issue, your team struggled to identify the root cause because you lacked visibility into the system's behavior. To improve your ability to diagnose future issues, you decide to implement a solution that provides a holistic view of the system, tracks metrics over time, and enables a detailed analysis of events. Which approach should you prioritize?
- A
Enable CloudWatch Logs for Lambda functions to capture detailed event logs.
- B
Use AWS X-Ray to implement tracing across the application for end-to-end observability.
- C
Set up Amazon CloudWatch Alarms to monitor key performance metrics and notify the team of anomalies.
- D
Create custom dashboards in Amazon CloudWatch to visualize logs and metrics in real time.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B
Explanation
Observability is about gaining a comprehensive understanding of the system's behavior, including how components interact and where issues might arise. While logging and monitoring are important components, they do not provide the holistic view necessary for diagnosing complex, distributed issues. AWS X-Ray is specifically designed to enable observability by tracing requests across the service components, making it the best choice for this scenario.
- A. Incorrect.
Enabling CloudWatch Logs for Lambda functions provides detailed logs of individual functions but does not give a holistic, end-to-end view of the system. This is logging, not observability.
- B. Correct.
AWS X-Ray enables tracing across distributed components of your application, which allows you to achieve observability by identifying bottlenecks, errors, and latency issues in a holistic manner.
- C. Incorrect.
CloudWatch Alarms are useful for monitoring specific metrics and notifying the team of anomalies, but they are part of monitoring, not observability.
- D. Incorrect.
Custom dashboards in CloudWatch are useful for visualizing logs and metrics but do not provide the detailed tracing and systemic insights required for observability.