X-Ray traces requests as they travel through your distributed application, showing where time is spent and where errors occur across services — essential for debugging microservices and serverless apps.
The tell
When a scenario needs to find performance bottlenecks or trace a request across multiple services (API Gateway → Lambda → DynamoDB), that’s X-Ray. CloudWatch tells you that something is slow; X-Ray shows you where in the request path. Distributed tracing → X-Ray.
Test yourself
A serverless app spanning API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB is slow, and the team needs to see which component causes the latency in a request. Which service?
- Amazon CloudWatch metrics alone
- AWS X-Ray
- AWS CloudTrail
- AWS Config
👉 Click to reveal the answer & explanation
Correct answer: B. X-Ray provides end-to-end distributed tracing, pinpointing which service in the request path adds latency or errors. CloudWatch metrics (A) show that it’s slow but not where; CloudTrail (C) logs API calls; Config (D) tracks configuration.
Related topics
Amazon CloudWatch · AWS Lambda · API Gateway
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