GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Question

Your company exposes a payments REST API through Apigee X. Shortly after deploying a new proxy revision, SREs see a sharp rise in HTTP 5xx responses in one region. They need to pinpoint whether the failures originate in an Apigee policy or the backend service while keeping production traffic flowing. Which Apigee capability should you recommend they use first to troubleshoot individual live requests end-to-end without interrupting users?

Query Apigee Analytics to review historical error-rate dashboards and drill into dimension filters.
Enable Cloud Monitoring uptime checks on the backend and examine generated logs for failure details.
Start a Trace session for the affected proxy to capture and inspect live request and response flows through each policy step.
Add a MessageLogging policy to every flow, redeploy the proxy, and review log entries in Cloud Logging.

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Answer Description

The Apigee Trace tool lets engineers start a time-bound trace session against a specific environment and proxy. During the session Apigee captures a sampled set of live requests and shows, in real time, each request's timeline across all policies, target calls, request/response payloads, and any errors returned. This enables rapid isolation of failures (for example, a fault policy throwing errors versus a backend timeout) without changing the proxy or affecting normal traffic.

Apigee Analytics provides aggregated metrics and historical error rates but lacks per-request execution detail needed for step-by-step debugging. Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, or adding MessageLogging policies can offer additional insight, yet they do not deliver the interactive, low-latency view of each message's journey that Trace supplies. Therefore, initiating a Trace session is the most effective first step for real-time root-cause analysis while the API remains live.

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