SAP-C03 practice question: Metrics, logs, tracing and SLOs (CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry, Application Signals) (1 of 2)
Operational Excellence and Automation A free question from our original SAP-C03 practice exam. Try it, then open the answer to see why each option is right or wrong.
A streaming service runs 60 microservices written in Java, Python, Go and Node.js, on Amazon EKS and AWS Lambda. Engineers cannot follow a single customer request across services, and the platform team wants traces that work the same in every language. Two of the services are older Java applications that cannot be changed quickly.
The platform team also wants the instrumentation to stay on a vendor-neutral standard, and the traces must reach AWS X-Ray and CloudWatch without a separate tracing server to run.
Which approach meets these requirements?
Choose one answer.
AA. Instrument every service with the AWS X-Ray SDK for its language, and run the X-Ray daemon as a sidecar in each pod to send the traces.
BB. Instrument each service with OpenTelemetry, using auto-instrumentation agents for the older Java services, and export traces through the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry collector to X-Ray and CloudWatch.
CC. Write custom logging in each service that prints the request ID and the duration of each call, and use CloudWatch Logs Insights to join the entries across the services by the shared request ID on a dashboard.
DD. Turn on the detailed metrics for each EKS node and Lambda function, and compare the average latency per service on the CloudWatch dashboard.
Show the answer and explanation
Answer: B
A. Wrong: The X-Ray SDKs and daemon are in maintenance mode, so new instrumentation should not start on them. The option also gives a different instrumentation library for each language.
B. Right: Correct. OpenTelemetry gives one standard across languages, and its Java auto-instrumentation agent adds tracing to the older services without code changes. The AWS Distro collector exports the traces to X-Ray and CloudWatch, so no separate tracing server is needed.
C. Wrong: Logs joined by hand give a less complete picture than a distributed trace, and each language would print its own format. The option does not produce traces across services.
D. Wrong: Averages per service do not follow one request across the services it calls. The option does not show where a single customer request spends its time.
Explanation
The AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry gives one vendor-neutral instrumentation standard across languages and exports traces to X-Ray and CloudWatch with a collector rather than a separate server. The X-Ray SDK is in maintenance mode, and logs or averaged metrics cannot follow one request across services.
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