AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – ProfessionalMonitoring and LoggingMedium

A development team has deployed a new microservices application on Amazon EKS. They observe intermittent latency spikes and errors, but traditional log analysis makes it difficult to pinpoint the root cause across distributed services. They need a solution to visualize the request flow end-to-end, identify bottlenecks, and understand service dependencies without extensively modifying their application code.

  1. AConfigure AWS App Mesh to automatically collect metrics and logs for inter-service communication.
  2. BImplement Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights to collect performance metrics and logs from the EKS cluster.
  3. CEnable AWS X-Ray tracing for the services running in EKS by deploying the X-Ray daemon as a sidecar.
  4. DUse Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights to query and analyze application logs from all microservices.
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: C. Enable AWS X-Ray tracing for the services running in EKS by deploying the X-Ray daemon as a sidecar.

AWS X-Ray is designed for end-to-end tracing of requests as they traverse distributed applications. By deploying the X-Ray daemon as a sidecar in EKS, services can send trace data, allowing visualization of service maps, latency analysis, and identification of bottlenecks without significant code changes.

Why the other options are wrong

  • A. App Mesh can provide observability, but X-Ray is specifically for distributed tracing and visualizing request flows, which is the core requirement here.
  • B. Container Insights provides cluster-level metrics and logs but doesn't trace requests end-to-end across services.
  • D. CloudWatch Logs Insights helps analyze logs but doesn't provide a visual end-to-end trace of requests across services.

AWS X-Ray for Distributed Tracing

AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug distributed applications by collecting data about requests that your application serves.

  • Provides end-to-end request tracing.
  • Generates service maps to visualize connections and latency.
  • Supports various AWS services and custom applications.
  • Helps identify performance bottlenecks and errors.

Memory trick: X-Ray traces the 'X-marks-the-spot' of bottlenecks in your distributed app.

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