DEV204_Debugging Modern Applications Introduction to AWS X-Ray

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AWS re:INVENT
Debugging Modern Applications:
Introduction to AWS X-Ray
A b h i s h e k S i n g h ( A W S )
A l a i n N i c o l e t ( C h i c k - f i l - A )
D E V 2 0 4
N o v e m b e r 2 8 , 2 0 1 7

What to Expect from the Session
 Overview
 Concepts
 Use cases
 Getting started
 Customer story
 Q&A

Debugging Applications

Traditional Debugging
Developer Local Test
Developer
Add
Breakpoints
Add Log
Statements

Monolithic vs. Service-Oriented Architecture
Service-Oriented
Architecture
Monolithic

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

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
DynamoDB
Amazon
SQS queue
Frontend API

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

Concepts

X-Ray Concepts
user
Amazon
DynamoDB
table
Amazon
SQS queue
Frontend API

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

Use Cases

Visualize Service Call Graph

Identify Impact

Pinpoint Issues

Identify Performance Bottlenecks

AWS Lambda (Initialization)

AWS Lambda (Existing Container)

AWS Lambda (Exceptions)

AWS Lambda (Exception Details)

Advanced Use Cases
Use Off-Cloud Custom Payload Deep Linking Custom Apps
via API
Filter
Expressions

Interested in building custom apps?
DEV402: Deep-Dive for AWS X-Ray
Thursday (11/30) @ 1:00 p.m.
Venetian, Level 2, Titian 2204

How Does AWS X-Ray Work?

X-Ray SDK
Enables you to get started quickly without having to manually instrument your
application code to log metadata about requests
Source on GitHub under https://www.github.com/aws/
Available for Java, .NET, Python, Go, and Node.js
Adds filters to automatically capture 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
Pre-installed on AWS Lambda
Can be run anywhere as long as AWS credentials are provided (for
example, EC2, ECS, on-premises, developer machine, and others)

X-Ray Service

Trace ID & Propagation

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

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% 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% 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 (that is, 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());

Customer Story

Introduction
Alain Nicolet
Enterprise Architect for Operator and Restaurant facing systems
Atlanta, Georgia
Chick-fil-A

Cloud
+
DevOps
+
Microservices
Journey

Spring Boot
Operator Mobile App
• Sales Metrics API
• Labor API
• Truck Tracking API
• User Preferences API
• News API
• And More
Use Case
AWS
Lambda
AWS
Elastic
Beanstalk
Amazon
DynamoDB

Successful, Not Perfect!
 Made a big impact
 Positive feedback from operators!
 Microservices are awesome!
X Debugging is log-based, annoying, and slow
Need application-level tracing and performance monitoring

Enter X-Ray
• Evaluated APM options including X-Ray
• It had the features we needed
• Participated in beta
• Used it for the past year
AWS X-Ray

Trace Everything? Yes
Cloud Pricing
AWS X-Ray
Standard: Always have application-level performance monitoring
turned on for everything we build/deploy
Three reasons we chose X-Ray
Before X-Ray, cost more for tracing than compute (3X to 10X)
Focus on strategic initiatives, not infrastructureTracing as a Service
1) Check box at deploy
2) Add to POM
3) Common integration points
4) Custom measurements
Easy Integration

X-Ray Impact
Changed Our Team
• 2 minutes in X-Ray saves hours
• Encourages curiosity and ownership
of performance
• Graphical peer reviews
• Data-driven decisions
Enables Analytics
• URL-level performance metrics
• Export data and track changes over
time
• Track against error budgets

Real-World Use Case

Thanks!
“Don’t dismiss the importance of making fun a priority.”
- Truett Cathy
Contact information:
Alain Nicolet
www.linkedin.com/in/alainnicolet
Atlanta, GA
Chick-fil-A

Additional Information

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

Helpful Links
Go to https://aws.amazon.com/xray to learn more
Documentation: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/xray/latest/devguide/aws-
xray.html
Samples:
 .NET: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-xray-dotnet-webapp
 Java: https://github.com/awslabs/eb-java-scorekeep/tree/xray
 Node.js: https://github.com/awslabs/eb-node-express-sample/tree/xray
 Python: https://github.com/awslabs/eb-py-flask-signup/tree/xray
 Lambda: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-xray-rekognition-lambda-sample
 Alarms & Alerts: https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-xray-cloudwatch-event

Q&A

Thank you!

DEV204_Debugging Modern Applications Introduction to AWS X-Ray

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