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

Explanations:

Configuring Aurora MySQL to publish slow query and error logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs will allow the team to analyze database performance and diagnose issues related to slow queries or errors during peak events.

Implementing AWS X-Ray for tracing both HTTP requests and SQL queries will provide detailed visibility into the application’s request flow and database interactions, which is useful for diagnosing issues during peak load events.

Installing and configuring the Amazon CloudWatch Logs agent on EC2 instances will ensure that Apache logs are streamed to CloudWatch Logs, providing detailed access and error logs for further analysis.

Streaming slow query and error logs from Aurora MySQL to Kinesis is unnecessary in this scenario. CloudWatch Logs are more suitable for log aggregation and performance analysis in this case.

While AWS CloudTrail can collect API activity data, it does not provide detailed application performance metrics or logs that are crucial for diagnosing timeouts and errors in a web application.

Enabling performance benchmarking and streaming to AWS X-Ray for Aurora MySQL is not the most effective solution here. X-Ray is more suited for application-level tracing, and Aurora’s native slow query and performance logs are more directly relevant.