Question

A retail company runs a microservices order-processing platform on Amazon ECS Fargate. Services communicate through Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and Amazon SQS. During peak sales, customers report intermittent slow checkout responses, but the team cannot pinpoint which downstream service is causing the added latency. CloudWatch metrics show all services are healthy and within normal error thresholds. The operations team needs end-to-end visibility into request paths to identify the specific segment introducing delay, with minimal code changes. What is the MOST effective approach?

Accepted Answer

Enable AWS X-Ray tracing across API Gateway, Lambda, and ECS services using the X-Ray SDK/daemon, and analyze the service map and trace segment timings to locate the latency bottleneck.

Answer

Increase the CloudWatch metrics resolution to high-resolution (1-second) custom metrics for each service and build a dashboard correlating latency across all components.

Answer

Enable VPC Flow Logs on the Fargate task ENIs and use Amazon Athena to query packet-level latency between services.

Answer

Turn on CloudWatch Container Insights for the ECS cluster and set anomaly-detection alarms on CPU and memory utilization for each task.