X-Ray

AWS X-Ray is a distributed tracing platform that instruments applications and ingests request and response data. It's designed for use in microservices environments.

Concepts

• Service Maps allow developers to model the structure of the application, allowing for better visualisations of dependencies.
• They're visualisations of the Service Graph X-Ray assembles from the instrumentation data it gathers.
• Errors and exceptions raised during execution are collected and raised as part of segments.
• Segments contain details of the host, client, request, work done, response data and any collected errors.
• Subsegments provide details on smaller units of work within a segment, e.g. database interactions.
• Traces track requests as they flow through the application, across services. The tracing data is correlated using the X-Amzn-Trace-Id header.
• Sampling ensures collected data is representative without collecting everything.
• Tags on trace data allow filtering the data and improve discoverability.

Integrations

Seamless integrations are provided for AWS services:

• EC2
• ECS
• Lambda
• Beanstalk

SDK

An SDK is available for application-level integration:

• Java
• node.js
• .NET

The SDK provides:

• Interceptors which trace incoming HTTP requests.
• Client handlers which instrument client SDKs for other AWS services.
• An instrumented HTTP client for instrumenting internal and external applications.