X-Ray traces applications and helps to identify potential problems or optimizations in the applications. It provides a visualization of your application’s underlying components.
Features
The X-Ray Service Map provides an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through your application. It allows you to troubleshoot the root cause of connection/performance issues and errors.
- Segments
- data about the work done by application
- request, response, issues …
- Subsegments
- a more granular view of data inside of segments
- Service Graph
- a JSON document of how the application’s services and resources interact (visualized)
- Traces
- At first, HTTP header trace ID (X-Amzn-Trace-Id) -> and propagates downstream to track through the system
X-Ray can track application errors
- Errors (Client error – 400)
- Fault (Server error – 500)
- Throttle (429 Too many requests)
X-Ray Architecture
- The X-Ray agent must be installed on your EC2 instance.
- Configure your applications using the X-Ray SDK
- The X-Ray SDK gathers information from request and response headers, the code in your application, and metadata about the AWS resources on which it runs, and sends this trace data to X-Ray. e.g. incoming HTTP requests, error codes, latency data.
X-Ray Daemon
X-Ray Daemon is an AWS application that
- listens on UDP port 2000
- collects raw segment data
- sends it to the AWS X-Ray API
X-Ray SDK code sends the data to the X-Ray daemon, which buffers segments in a queue and uploads them to the X-Ray service in batches.
- Run the X-Ray deamon to a Dockerized application
- Run the X-Ray daemon in a new Docker container alongside the other microservices which make up your application
- Run the X-Ray deamon on AWS Elastic Beanstalk
- Run the X-Ray daemon on Amazon EC2 instances inside your Elastic Beanstalk environment.
Integration
X-Ray integrates with AWS Services or custom applications.
- AWS Services
- EC2, Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, SNS, SQS, DynamoDB, Elastic Load Balancer, Elastic Container Service, and API Gateway.
- Custom Application
- applications written in .NET, Java, Node.js, Go, Ruby, or Python.
- The X-Ray SDK automatically captures metadata of API calls made to AWS services.
X-Ray with Elastic Beanstalk
- Elastic Beanstalk includes the X-Ray daemon
- The daemon is not provided for multi-container Docker.
- Run the daemon by setting up an option in the UI (Console) or in a configuration file (.ebextensions/xray-daemon.config)
- Make sure to provide the correct IAM permission to the instance profile
option_settings:
aws:elasticbeanstalk:xray:XRayEnabled: true
Annotations
- Annotations are simple key-value pairs that indexed in the X-Ray.
- Annotations are used to filter traces
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