How I met X-Ray

About me
Backend and Cloud Infrastructure engineer.
Certified AWS Solutions Architect.
Contractor.
My blog: http://zonov.me/
Youtube channel: CodeRunFun

Shortly about X-Ray
X-rays make up X-radiation, a form of high-energy electromagnetic radiation. Most
X-rays have a wavelength ranging from 0.01 to 10 nanometers, corresponding to
frequencies in the range 30 petahertz to 30 exahertz (3×1016 Hz to 3×1019 Hz) and
energies in the range 100 eV to 100 keV. X-ray wavelengths are shorter than those
of UV rays and typically longer than those of gamma rays. In many languages,
X-radiation is referred to as Röntgen radiation, after the German scientist Wilhelm
Röntgen, who discovered it on November 8, 1895. He named it X-radiation to
signify an unknown type of radiation. Spelling of X-ray(s) in the English language
includes the variants x-ray(s), xray(s), and X ray(s).

X-Ray is an AWS
service helping to
analyze and debug
distributed systems

AWS X-Ray improves
observability

What observability is?

a fancy new word, like a DevOps and Chaos
Engineering
Observability is

not a monitoring
Observability is

a measure of how well internal states of a system
can be inferred from knowledge of its external
outputs.
Observability is

What observability consists of
Monitoring Alerting/visualization
Distributed system
tracing
Log
aggregation/analytics

● Rollbar or Airbrake
● Newrelic or Datadog
● CloudWatch
● Kibana
● PagerDuty
Tooling you may use for observability

How X-Ray is different from that
● Tracks errors like Rollbar or Airbrake
● Partially an APM as Newrelic or Datadog
● Totally different thing than CloudWatch
● Can show you some things like Kibana
● Totally different thing than PagerDuty

Where it can be used
● Lambdas
● Traditional apps on OpsWorks or ECS
● *Some other AWS services

What about *Some other AWS services
Can be enabled on the API Gateway, ELB, SQS,
SNS and some others

Active and PassThrough
Active - service decides when to send the data
PassThrough - upstream service says when to

Features. Service map

Features. Segments performance

Features. Custom subsegments

Features. Sampling

Enough of
introduction
Give us some meat!

The architecture

First experience. The good

First experience. The bad

But why?????

AWS Support team answers

How to avoid
Easy , enable X-Ray everywhere ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Easy… What about dependencies?
Ruby >= 2.3.6
...

Dependencies
Our Ruby version is 2.2.x
Our stack is OpsWorks, ECS, Lambdas on Ruby, Go, NodeJS.
Sounds like an epic...

What if we rethink
the approach
To start the adoption

Second experience. The Success Story
Solving real-world production performance issue

Identifying performance bottlenecks
in a lambda in production using X-Ray

The first bottleneck and Elasticsearch upgrade

The second bottleneck and code optimization

X-Ray traces
🐌 Before...

🎉 After...

Can I achieve the same with Newrelic or Datadog?
Yes, but...

How to enable it

How to enable for API Gateway
Just one line.
But please make sure you are ready that it will be
enabled for each and every service beneath*
* if they have sufficient permissions

How to enable for a single Lambda
You need permissions, flag...

How to enable for a single Lambda
You need permissions, flag… and code

How to enable for an application
You need permissions, daemon and code to send
data