AWS Certified Developer Associate · Free Practice Question Medium
Question 1
A Development team wants to instrument their code to provide more detailed information to AWS X-Ray than simple outgoing and incoming requests. This will generate large amounts of data, so the Development team wants to implement indexing so they can filter the data.
What should the Development team do to achieve this?
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A
Install required plugins for the appropriate AWS SDK
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B
Add metadata to the segment document
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C
Add annotations to the segment document
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D
Configure the necessary X-Ray environment variables
Reveal correct answer
Correct answer: C
Explanation
AWS X-Ray makes it easy for developers to analyze the behavior of their production, distributed applications with end-to-end tracing capabilities. You can use X-Ray to identify performance bottlenecks, edge case errors, and other hard to detect issues.
When you instrument your application, the X-Ray SDK records information about incoming and outgoing requests, the AWS resources used, and the application itself. You can add other information to the segment document as annotations and metadata. Annotations and metadata are aggregated at the trace level and can be added to any segment or subsegment.
Annotations are simple key-value pairs that are indexed for use with filter expressions. Use annotations to record data that you want to use to group traces in the console, or when calling the GetTraceSummaries API. X-Ray indexes up to 50 annotations per trace.
Metadata are key-value pairs with values of any type, including objects and lists, but that are not indexed. Use metadata to record data you want to store in the trace but don't need to use for searching traces.
You can view annotations and metadata in the segment or subsegment details in the X-Ray console.

In this scenario, we need to add annotations to the segment document so that the data that needs to be filtered is indexed.
CORRECT: "Add annotations to the segment document" is the correct answer.
INCORRECT: "Add metadata to the segment document" is incorrect as metadata is not indexed for filtering.
INCORRECT: "Configure the necessary X-Ray environment variables" is incorrect as this will not result in indexing of the required data.
INCORRECT: "Install required plugins for the appropriate AWS SDK" is incorrect as there are no plugin requirements for the AWS SDK to support this solution as the annotations feature is available in AWS X-Ray.
References:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/xray/latest/devguide/xray-concepts.html#xray-concepts-annotations
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