AWS Certified Developer – Associate — Question 325

A company deployed an application as a set of microservices that run on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The performance of the microservices has started to degrade for a specific set of user requests. The company needs to gain deeper insight into the request behavior that is associated with the performance degradation.

Which process will meet this requirement?

Answer options

• A. Create a Docker image that runs the AWS X-Ray daemon. Run the image alongside the microservices in Amazon ECS. Use the X-Ray console to view requests to the microservices.
• B. Perform distributed tracing based on the ALB's built-in traffic request metrics.
• C. Use Amazon CloudWatch to collect metrics and logs from Amazon ECS. Perform distributed tracing based on the ECS metrics and logs.
• D. Create an Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events) rule to capture the ECS metrics and logs. Use the EventBridge console to view the requests to the microservices.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

AWS X-Ray is the service designed for distributed tracing, allowing developers to analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. Running the X-Ray daemon in a container alongside the microservices on Amazon ECS enables the collection and visualization of detailed request traces. Standard CloudWatch logs, ALB metrics, and EventBridge rules do not provide the end-to-end distributed tracing capabilities required to isolate performance bottlenecks across microservices.