To monitor end-to-end requests and debug issues across microservices, you need distributed tracing. Among AWS tools, AWS X-Ray is specifically built for this use case.
Step-by-Step Breakdown:
Step 1: Understand the Requirement
The developer needs:
End-to-end request tracing across microservices
Debugging capability for performance issues or failures
This points directly to a distributed tracing solution rather than just logs or metrics.
Step 2: Evaluate the Options
Option A: Amazon CloudWatch
CloudWatch is powerful for metrics, logs, and alerts.
But it does not provide distributed tracing or request path visualization between microservices.
So, it's not sufficient alone for the requirement.
Option B: AWS CloudTrail
CloudTrail tracks API calls made through the AWS Management Console, CLI, SDKs.
It is meant for auditing and governance, not microservices request tracing.
Not suitable for debugging microservices interactions.
Option C: AWS X-Ray SDK with X-Ray service map
Purpose-built for distributed tracing
Automatically collects data about requests as they travel through your microservices
You can instrument your code with the AWS X-Ray SDK in Java, Node.js, Python, Go, .NET, etc.
Visualizes requests using a service map, showing latency, errors, and time spent in downstream services.
How it works:
Instrument each microservice using the AWS X-Ray SDK.
Use the SDK to trace requests, propagate trace headers across services.
The X-Ray daemon collects and sends trace data to the X-Ray service.
You can view the service map, see bottlenecks, error rates, etc.
Option D: AWS Health
AWS Health provides information on AWS service outages or account-level events.
It does not monitor your application or microservices health or request flows.
Correct Choice: C is the only option that meets the developer's requirement to monitor end-to-end request paths and debug issues in a microservices architecture.
AWS Developer References:
AWS X-Ray Documentation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/xray/latest/devguide/aws-xray.html
Instrumenting your application: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/xray/latest/devguide/xray-sdk.html
Viewing the Service Map: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/xray/latest/devguide/xray-console-service-map.html
Tracing Microservices with AWS X-Ray: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/tracing-microservices-aws-x-ray/
