SOA-C02 Question 8
Select 3Your company runs a high-traffic web application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application has been experiencing intermittent latency spikes, and your manager has asked you to implement monitoring to identify potential causes. You decide to utilize AWS monitoring and logging services to address this requirement. Which combination of actions should you take to achieve this?
- A
Enable ALB access logs and store them in an S3 bucket for analysis.
- B
Create Amazon CloudWatch Alarms for the ALB's TargetResponseTime metric.
- C
Set up a CloudWatch log filter to capture HTTP 5XX error codes from the ALB logs.
- D
Enable VPC Flow Logs to capture network traffic for the instances.
- E
Create a CloudWatch Alarm to monitor the CPU utilization of the EC2 instances.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answers: A, B, C
Explanation
To diagnose intermittent latency spikes in an application using AWS tools, you need to focus on the components involved in request handling. Enabling ALB access logs helps analyze traffic patterns, monitoring the TargetResponseTime metric provides real-time latency insights, and capturing HTTP 5XX error codes identifies server-side issues. While other monitoring options like VPC Flow Logs and CPU utilization are useful in other contexts, they are not directly relevant to addressing this specific issue.
- A. Correct.
Enabling ALB access logs allows you to analyze incoming traffic patterns and identify any abnormal requests or errors. Storing them in an S3 bucket provides a centralized location for further analysis.
- B. Correct.
The ALB's TargetResponseTime metric in CloudWatch measures the time the load balancer takes to respond to requests. Creating alarms for this metric helps you detect latency spikes in real-time.
- C. Correct.
A CloudWatch log filter capturing HTTP 5XX error codes from ALB logs can help identify server-side issues contributing to latency spikes.
- D. Incorrect.
While VPC Flow Logs capture network traffic, they do not directly help in identifying latency issues or server-side errors in the ALB or EC2 instances.
- E. Incorrect.
Monitoring CPU utilization on EC2 instances is a good practice, but it does not specifically help identify latency issues caused by the ALB or its targets.