SAA-C03 Question 218
Single answerA company has a microservices-based application running on Amazon ECS, with multiple services communicating with each other over HTTP. The development team is experiencing difficulty in tracing requests as they move across different services to identify bottlenecks and performance issues. Which solution will provide end-to-end visibility into the application requests?
- A
Enable AWS X-Ray tracing on each ECS service and ensure the application code is instrumented with the X-Ray SDK.
- B
Use Amazon CloudWatch Logs to automatically trace requests across all ECS services without modifying the application code.
- C
Deploy an Application Load Balancer (ALB) and enable logging to trace requests between ECS services.
- D
Enable AWS Config to monitor the configuration changes of ECS services and trace application requests.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
AWS X-Ray is designed specifically for tracing end-to-end requests in distributed systems like microservices. By enabling X-Ray on ECS services and instrumenting application code with the X-Ray SDK, the development team can collect detailed performance data, trace requests, and diagnose bottlenecks across multiple services. Other services like CloudWatch Logs and ALB logging provide monitoring and logging capabilities but do not offer the same level of visibility as X-Ray for tracing requests end-to-end.
- A. Correct.
This is the correct answer. AWS X-Ray provides end-to-end request tracing for microservices. Enabling X-Ray on ECS services and instrumenting the application code with the X-Ray SDK allows capturing detailed traces, identifying bottlenecks, and pinpointing performance issues.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Although Amazon CloudWatch Logs can provide logging and monitoring information, it does not automatically trace requests across services. X-Ray is required for end-to-end tracing.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. An Application Load Balancer (ALB) can log requests, but it cannot provide detailed tracing across microservices. You still need a tool like AWS X-Ray for comprehensive tracing.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. AWS Config is used for tracking configuration changes and compliance, not for tracing application requests in a microservices architecture.