X-Ray

Question 1

What is needed on the EC2/ECS/Elastic Beanstalk environment/On-premise to send data to X-Ray?

Answer 1

1. X-Ray SDK
2. X-Ray Daemon
3. Instrument your application using the SDK to send the required data to X-Ray, e.g. data about incoming HTTP requests to your application

Question 2

Where should the X-Ray daemon be installed?

Answer 2

1. On premises & EC2 instances
   - Install the X-Ray daemon on you EC2 instance or on-premises server
2. Elastic Beanstalk
   - Install the X-Ray daemon on the EC2 instance inside your Elastic Beanstalk environment
3. Elastic Container Service
   - Install the X-Ray daemon in its own Docker container on your ECS cluster alongside your app
   - Do NOT install the X-Ray daemon on the same container as your application is running

Question 3

Give a few examples of AWS services that X-Ray integrates with.

Answer 3

• Lambda
• API Gateway
• Elastic Load Balancer
• EC2
• Elastic Beanstalk
• SNS
• SQS
• You can also instrument your own applications to send data to X-Ray

Question 4

If you want your own application to send information to X-Ray, what can the application be running on?

Answer 4

• EC2
• Elastic Beanstalk environment
• Elastic Container Service with Docker
• On-premises system

Question 5

What kind you information can you add to make it easier to filter among your data in X-Ray?

Answer 5

• You can use annotations to add user defined key-value pairs to your X-Ray data. This will allow you to filter, index and search within X-Ray.
• E.g. game_name=TicTacToe, game_id=123456

Question 6

What is X-Ray?

Answer 6

• It is a way of visualizing your serverless application
• It is a service that:
• collects data about requests that your application serves
• provides tools you can use to view, filter, and gain insights into that data to identify issues and opportunities for optimisation.
• You can see detailed information not only about the request and response, but also about calls that your application makes to downstream AWS resources, microservices, databases and HTTP web APIs

Question 7

What three things does the X-Ray SDK provide?

Answer 7

• Interceptors to add to you code to trace incoming HTTP requests
• Client handlers to instrument AWS SDK clients that your application uses to call other AWS services
• An HTTP client to use to instrument calls to other internal and external HTTP web services

Question 8

What 6 languages are supported by X-Ray?

Answer 8

Basically all that are supported by Lambda.

• Java
• Python
• Go
• Node.js
• .Net
• Ruby