Debugging Modern Applications: Introduction to AWS X-Ray

© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved
Debugging Modern Applications: Introduction to AWS X-Ray
Abhishek Singh,
Sr. Manager, Product Management

© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved
What to expect from the session
 Overview
 Use Cases
 Concepts
 Getting Started
 Demo
 Q&A

Debugging Applications

Traditional Debugging
Developer Local Test
Developer
Add
Breakpoints
Add Log
Statements

The traditional process of debugging doesn’t scale well for production applications or
those built using a service-oriented, microservice, or serverless architecture
It’s tedious, repetitive, and time consuming.

Monolithic
Monolithic vs. Service Oriented Architecture
Service Oriented Architecture

Drawbacks of Monolithic Architecture
Hard to Iterate Fast CI/CD Time ConsumingHard to scale Efficiently
Reliability Challenges

Benefits of Service Oriented Architecture
Increased Agility Easy to Scale Improved Innovation
Reduced Human Errors

Monolithic vs. Service Oriented Applications
Move to service oriented (microservices) and serverless
architectures to overcome the drawbacks of a monolithic
application architecture
But microservices come with their own set of challenges

Challenges
• Services such as AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2 Container Service, AWS
Elastic Beanstalk, AWS CloudFormation, etc. make it easier to deploy and
manage applications consisting of hundreds of services
Deploying and managing service oriented applications can be
more work compared to monolithic applications
Still hard to debug application issues in production applications due to:
 Cross-service interactions
 Varying log formats across services
 Collecting, aggregating, and collating logs from services

Log Centric Approach
service 1 logs
service 2 logs
service 3 logs
user

User Centric Approach
user
Amazon API
Gateway
AWS Lambda
Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon
SQS queue

Identify Performance
Bottlenecks
How does AWS X-Ray help?
Pinpoint Specific
Service Issues
Identify Errors Identify Impact to Users

Use Cases

Visualize service call graph

Identify impact

Identify performance bottlenecks

Pinpoint issues

AWS Lambda

Advanced Use Cases
Use off-cloud Custom Payload Deep Linking Custom Apps via
API
Filter Expressions

How does AWS X-Ray work?

X-Ray Service

X-Ray SDK
Enables you to get started quickly without having to manually instrument your
application code to log metadata about requests
Available for Java, .NET, and Node.js
Adds filters to automatically captures metadata for calls to:
 AWS services using the AWS SDK
 Non-AWS services over HTTP and HTTPS
 Databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Amazon DynamoDB)
 Queues (Amazon SQS)

X-Ray Daemon
Receives data from the SDK over UDP and acts as a local buffer. Data
is flushed to the backend every second or when the local buffer fills.
Available for Amazon Linux AMI, RHEL, Ubuntu, OS X, and Windows.
Can be run anywhere as long as AWS credentials are provided (e.g.: EC2,
ECS, on premise, developer machine, etc.)

App & X-Ray
SDK
EC2 Instance
X-Ray
Daemon
Localhost
UDP
X-Ray API
HTTPS
HTTPS
X-Ray Console
App & X-Ray
SDK
Server
X-Ray
Daemon
Localhost
UDP
EC2 Role
AWS
Credentials
DevOps Team
HTTPS
X-Ray Workflow

Concepts

X-Ray Concepts
Trace End-to-end data related a single request across services
Segments Portions of the trace that correspond to a single service
Sub-segments Remote call or local compute sections within a service
Annotations Business data that can be used to filter traces
Metadata Business data that can be added to the trace but not used for filtering traces
Errors Normalized error message and stack trace
Sampling Percentage of requests to your application to capture as traces

X-Ray Concepts
user
Amazon API
Gateway
AWS Lambda
Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon
SQS queue

Sampling Configuration
{
"rules": {
“payment": {
"id": 1,
"service_name": "*",
"http_method": "*",
"url_path": "/api/payment/*",
"fixed_target": 0,
"rate": 1.00
},
"base": {
"id": 2,
"service_name": "*",
"http_method": "*",
"url_path": "*",
"fixed_target": 1,
"rate": 0.1
}
}
}
This example defines two rules.
The first rule applies a 100 percent sampling rate
with no minimum number of requests to trace to
requests with paths under /api/payment
The second overrides the default sampling rule
with a rule that traces the first request each
second and 10 percent of additional requests.

APIs

X-Ray API
X-Ray provides a set of APIs to enable you to send, filter, and retrieve
trace data
You can send trace data directly to the service without having to use
our SDKs (i.e.: you can write your own SDKs for languages not
currently supported)
Raw trace data is available using batch get APIs
You can build your own data analysis applications on top of the data
collected by X-Ray

X-Ray API
PutTraceSegments Uploads segment documents to AWS X-Ray
BatchGetTraces Retrieves a list of traces specified by ID
GetServiceGraph Retrieves a document that describes services in your application and their
connections
GetTraceSummaries Retrieves IDs and metadata for traces available for a specified time frame
using an optional filter

Segment Document
Minimal example
{
"name" : "example.com",
"id" : "70de5b6f19ff9a0a",
"start_time" : 1.478293361271E9,
"trace_id" : "1-581cf771-a006649127e371903a2de979",
"end_time" : 1.478293361449E9
}
Example showing an in-progress segment
{
"name" : "example.com",
"id" : "70de5b6f19ff9a0b",
"start_time" : 1.478293361271E9,
"trace_id" : "1-581cf771-a006649127e371903a2de979",
“in_progress”: true
}

Getting Started

Agent installation (Amazon EC2 Linux)
#!/bin/bash
curl https://s3.dualstack.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/aws-xray-assets.us-east-1/xray-daemon/aws-xray-
daemon-1.x.rpm -o /home/ec2-user/xray.rpm
yum install -y /home/ec2-user/xray.rpm

Agent Installation (Amazon EC2 Windows)

Agent installation (Amazon ECS)

App Instrumentation (Node.js)
//Add aws-xray-sdk package to package.json
var XRay = require('aws-xray-sdk');
var AWS = captureAWS(require('aws-sdk'));
…
XRay.config([XRay.plugins.EC2]);
XRay.captureHTTPs(http);
XRay.setDefaultName('myfrontend-dev');
…
app.use(XRay.express.openSegment());
app.get('/', function(req, res)
…
app.get('/blog', function(req, res)
…
app.use(XRay.express.closeSegment());

Demo

X-Ray Pricing
Free tier
 The first 100,000 traces recorded are free
 The first 1,000,000 traces retrieved or scanned are free
Additional charges
 Beyond the free tier, traces recorded cost $5.00 per million traces.
 Beyond the free tier, traces retrieved or scanned cost $0.50 per million traces.

Availability
 Go to https://aws.amazon.com/xray to learn more
 Documentation: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/xray/latest/devguide/aws-xray.html
 .NET Sample: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-xray-dotnet-webapp
 Java Sample: https://github.com/awslabs/eb-java-scorekeep/tree/xray
 Node.js Sample: https://github.com/awslabs/eb-node-express-sample/tree/xray
The AWS X-Ray service is available in 14 regions today.

aws.amazon.com/activate
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Debugging Modern Applications: Introduction to AWS X-Ray

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