Question

A payments company instruments its microservices with the AWS X-Ray SDK. The default sampling configuration records the first request each second plus 5% of additional requests per service. During a fraud investigation, the team discovers that traces for the low-volume /refund endpoint are almost never captured, while the high-volume /checkout endpoint consumes nearly all of the sampled trace budget. The team must guarantee that a much higher proportion of /refund requests are traced without significantly increasing the total number of traces recorded for /checkout. What is the MOST appropriate way to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

Create a custom X-Ray sampling rule with higher priority that matches the /refund URL path with a fixed rate of 1 request per second and a high percentage rate, leaving the default rule to handle other paths.

Answer

Increase the reservoir and rate in the default sampling rule so that all endpoints are traced at a higher percentage across the entire application.

Answer

Enable active tracing on every Lambda function and API Gateway stage so that 100% of requests are traced regardless of path.

Answer

Add a CloudWatch Logs metric filter on the /refund access logs and create a subscription filter to forward matching entries to X-Ray for trace generation.