An organization runs application components across several AWS accounts and needs to gather and visualize distributed tracing data across those accounts. Which AWS service should be used to collect and view those traces?

AWS X-Ray is the correct choice because it is specifically designed for distributed tracing. It helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using microservices. X-Ray provides an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through various services, including those across multiple AWS accounts, making it ideal for gathering and visualizing tracing data. Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service but focuses on metrics, logs, and events, not distributed tracing across services. Amazon VPC Flow Logs capture IP traffic information for network interfaces in a VPC, which is useful for network troubleshooting but not for application-level distributed tracing. Amazon OpenSearch Service (formerly Amazon Elasticsearch Service) is a search and analytics engine, often used for log analysis, but it doesn't natively provide distributed tracing capabilities like X-Ray.