Troubleshooting Microservices on the Cloud

Correct Answer - C.

AWS X-Ray is a service that collects data about requests that your application serves and provides tools that you can use to view, filter, and gain insights into that data to identify issues and opportunities for optimization.

AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture.

https://aws.amazon.com/xray/

Option A is INCORRECT because AWS CloudTrail primarily records user or API activity, ‘who has done what.' It logs, continuously monitors, and retains account activity related to actions across AWS infrastructure.

CloudTrail provides event history in the AWS account activity but NOT that of the interaction of software microservices within a suite.

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudtrail/

Option B is INCORRECT because AWS CloudWatch does the primary function of monitoring and NOT debugging.

It collates data and actionable insights to monitor applications.

It also responds to system-wide performance changes, optimizes resource utilization, and gets a unified view of operational health.

However, the service does neither debug nor logs errors that occur amongst software microservices within a suite.

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/

Option D is INCORRECT because Amazon OpenSearch Service is a managed service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale OpenSearch clusters in the AWS Cloud.

It automatically detects and replaces failed OpenSearch Service nodes, reducing the overhead associated with self-managed infrastructures.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/opensearch-service/latest/developerguide/what-is.html

The service that can help in the troubleshooting process of a software suite consisting of multiple microservices hosted on the cloud, and that frequently gives runtime errors is AWS X-Ray.

AWS X-Ray is a service that allows developers to analyze and debug distributed applications, such as those consisting of multiple microservices. It provides an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through the system, showing how each microservice contributes to the overall request processing time. This makes it easier to identify bottlenecks and issues that may be causing runtime errors.

In addition to providing an overall view of the system, AWS X-Ray also provides detailed trace data for each request, showing the exact path taken by the request through the microservices and the time taken at each step. This allows developers to identify specific issues and drill down into the root cause of the runtime errors.

AWS CloudTrail is a service that provides a record of all API calls made in an AWS account. It is useful for auditing and compliance purposes but does not provide the detailed information needed for troubleshooting runtime errors in a distributed application.

AWS CloudWatch is a monitoring service that can be used to monitor the performance of AWS resources, such as EC2 instances and RDS databases. While it can be used to monitor the performance of microservices, it does not provide the end-to-end view of request processing that is needed for troubleshooting runtime errors.

Amazon OpenSearch Service is a managed search and analytics service that can be used to index and search data. It is not directly related to the troubleshooting of runtime errors in a distributed application.

Therefore, the best answer to this question is C. AWS X-Ray.