x-ray

Introduction

• Troubleshooting application performance and errors
• Distributed tracing of Micro-services
• Compatible with
  • Lambda
  • Beanstalk
  • ECS
  • ELB
  • API Gateway
  • EC2 instances or any on-premises app server
• You can enable x-ray by:
  • Install the x-ray daemon (on a server) or enable x-ray integration (some AWS services such as lambda)
  • You can instrument x-ray in your code using the AWS SDK
    • python, java, go, .NET, node.js

X-Ray APIs

• Writes
  • PutTraceSegments - Uploads a segment document int x-ray
  • PutTelemetryRecords - Used by the AWS X-Ray daemon o upload telemetry
  • GetSamplingRules - Retrieve all sampling rules
• Reads
  • GetServiceGraph - main graph
  • BatchGetTraces - Retries a list of traces specified by Id
  • GetTraceSummaries - Retrieve Ids and annotations for traces available for a specified time frame using an optional filter
  • GetTraceGraph

X-Ray with Beanstalk

• Beanstalk includes the x-ray daemon
• You can run the daemon by setting an option in the Elastic Beanstalk console or with a configuration file (in .ebextensions/xray-daemon.confi)

  option_settings:
    aws:elasticbeanstalk:xray:
      XRayEnabled: true
  

• Make sure to give your instance profile the correct IAM permissions so that the x-ray daemon can function correctly
• You app code must still be instrumented with the X-Ray integration code

ECS + X-Ray

• Pattens:
  • Run the X-Ray daemon container on every EC2 instance
  • Run the X-Ray container as a sidecar for the app containers (the only way to get ECS with Fargate working with X-Ray)