Which combination of steps must the solutions architect take to improve application performance visibility during peak traffic events?

Explanations:

Configuring Aurora MySQL DB to publish slow query and error logs to CloudWatch Logs allows for detailed performance monitoring and query analysis, especially during peak traffic events, providing insights into performance bottlenecks.

Implementing AWS X-Ray for tracing both HTTP requests and SQL queries helps identify performance issues across both the web server layer and the database layer, providing detailed end-to-end tracing for troubleshooting.

Installing the CloudWatch Logs agent on the EC2 instances to send Apache logs to CloudWatch Logs enables centralized logging, which is crucial for tracking user behavior, application errors, and performance issues during peak times.

Streaming Aurora slow query and error logs to Amazon Kinesis is not necessary for performance analysis in this scenario. CloudWatch Logs is sufficient and more appropriate for logging and monitoring.

AWS CloudTrail is useful for auditing and logging API calls, but it does not provide detailed application-level performance insights, query execution analysis, or request tracing, which are needed in this case.

Aurora MySQL does not have a specific “performance benchmarking” feature, and integrating with X-Ray for performance analysis is better achieved by enabling slow query logs and directly tracing SQL queries with the X-Ray SDK.