AWS Certified Developer – Associate — Question 433

A company has a multi-tier application that uses Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and Amazon RDS. The company wants to investigate a slow response time to calls that come from the API Gateway API.
What is the MOST operationally efficient way for the company to determine which internal call is causing the slow response times?

Answer options

• A. Use Amazon CloudWatch.
• B. Use AWS X-Ray.
• C. Use AWS CloudTrail.
• D. Use VPC Flow Logs.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

AWS X-Ray is designed specifically for analyzing and debugging distributed applications, providing end-to-end tracing across services like Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and Amazon RDS to easily pinpoint latency bottlenecks. While Amazon CloudWatch provides metrics and logs, it lacks the out-of-the-box distributed tracing map capability of X-Ray. AWS CloudTrail is used for auditing API calls, and VPC Flow Logs capture network traffic details, neither of which can trace application-level response times across these services.