AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – AssociateMonitoring, Logging, and RemediationHard
A SysOps administrator is troubleshooting an intermittent application issue that manifests as slow responses only during peak hours. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The administrator needs to identify if the latency is introduced by the ALB, the EC2 instances, or the backend database. What is the most effective approach to pinpoint the source of latency?
- AImplement AWS X-Ray across the application. Instrument the ALB, EC2 instances, and database calls to trace requests end-to-end.
- BUse Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights to analyze log patterns from the ALB access logs and EC2 instance logs.
- CConfigure detailed monitoring for EC2 instances to collect CPU, memory, and disk I/O metrics, and analyze ALB request count and target response time metrics.
- DEnable CloudWatch logging for the ALB to capture request and response times, enable VPC Flow Logs for the EC2 instances, and monitor RDS Performance Insights for the database.
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: A. Implement AWS X-Ray across the application. Instrument the ALB, EC2 instances, and database calls to trace requests end-to-end.
AWS X-Ray is designed for end-to-end distributed tracing, allowing the administrator to visualize the flow of requests through the application, identify performance bottlenecks, and pinpoint exactly where latency is being introduced across different services, including ALBs, EC2 instances, and database calls.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Contributor Insights helps identify top contributors to log events but doesn't provide the end-to-end request tracing necessary to pinpoint latency across multiple services.
- C. Monitoring individual metrics is useful but doesn't provide the causal link or trace of how a single request progresses through the entire system and where it experiences delays.
- D. While these logs and metrics provide data, correlating them manually to pinpoint latency across different components can be complex and time-consuming. X-Ray automates this.
AWS X-Ray for Distributed Tracing
AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug distributed applications by providing an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through the application, identifying performance bottlenecks and errors.
- Provides a service map and trace timelines.
- Supports various AWS services like EC2, Lambda, ALB, RDS.
- Helps pinpoint latency and errors in complex microservices architectures.
- Requires instrumentation of application code or proxies.
Memory trick: X-Ray traces the path, reveals the slow part.