A serverless application is monitored with AWS X-Ray. User interactions and transactions (low volume) are important to fully trace, while background operations (health checks, polling, connection maintenance) are high-volume and low-value to record. The default X-Ray sampling records only the first request per second plus some additional requests. How should the developer configure sampling to trace user interactions and transactions without wasting resources on background tasks?

The correct approach is to disable sampling for user interactions and transactions and trace all of them. This ensures critical user flows are always captured for full visibility. For high-volume, low-value background operations, applying a lower sampling rate (e.g., 1%) is appropriate. This reduces the amount of data sent to X-Ray, saving costs and resources, while still providing some visibility into these operations if needed. Incorrect options: Disabling sampling for high-volume requests would mean no tracing for them, which is not ideal for any level of visibility. Sampling at a lower rate for user interactions would miss critical traces. Sampling high-volume requests at a higher rate would waste resources and increase costs for low-value data. Sampling at a higher rate for user interactions is unnecessary if you can trace all of them, and disabling sampling for high-volume requests is not ideal.