DVA-C02 Development with AWS Services Practice Question
A company runs a microservices architecture on Amazon ECS with Fargate. The application experiences intermittent high latency. The operations team wants to trace requests across services and identify bottlenecks. Which AWS service should be used?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse CloudWatch Logs (which shows logs) or Metrics (which shows aggregates) with the distributed tracing capability that X-Ray uniquely provides for microservices architectures.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
AWS X-Ray
AWS X-Ray is the correct service because it provides end-to-end tracing of requests as they travel through microservices, capturing latency at each hop. It generates a service map that visualizes the flow and pinpoints bottlenecks, which is exactly what the operations team needs for a distributed application on ECS Fargate.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
VPC Flow Logs
Why it's wrong here
VPC Flow Logs record IP traffic going to and from network interfaces within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). While invaluable for network security, troubleshooting connectivity issues, and analyzing traffic patterns at the network layer, they do not provide application-level context or the ability to trace the execution path of a single request as it traverses multiple microservices. They lack the necessary instrumentation to link operations across different application components.
- ✗
Amazon CloudWatch Logs
Why it's wrong here
Amazon CloudWatch Logs collects, monitors, and stores log files from various AWS services and custom applications. Although individual service logs contain detailed events, correlating these disparate log entries across numerous microservices to reconstruct the end-to-end flow of a specific user request is an extremely manual and inefficient process. CloudWatch Logs alone does not inherently propagate trace context or visualize service dependencies.
- ✓
AWS X-Ray
Why this is correct
AWS X-Ray is purpose-built for end-to-end tracing and analysis of requests as they flow through distributed applications, including those running on Amazon ECS microservices. It collects data about requests, responses, and calls to downstream services, providing a visual service map, detailed trace data, and latency breakdowns for each segment. This enables developers to precisely identify performance bottlenecks, errors, and the full execution path of individual requests across complex architectures.
- ✗
Amazon CloudWatch Metrics
Why it's wrong here
Amazon CloudWatch Metrics collects and tracks key performance indicators (KPIs) and operational data points from AWS resources and applications. Metrics provide aggregated data, such as CPU utilization, request counts, or error rates over time, offering a high-level view of system health and trends. However, they do not capture the granular, individual request-level details or the sequential flow necessary to trace a specific transaction across multiple interdependent microservices.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DVA-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the DVA-C02 exam.