AWS X-Ray
AWS X-Ray is a distributed tracing service within Amazon Web Services that enables visual analysis to monitor and debug microservices-based applications end-to-end.
Key points
- Provides end-to-end information about the request, response, and calls made to other AWS resources as it travels through an application’s underlying microservices components.
- Creates a service graph from trace data collected off AWS resources, showing front-end and back-end service calls used to process requests; this graph helps troubleshoot issues and improve application performance.
- Legacy X-Ray SDKs were available for: Go, Java, Node.js, Python, Ruby, .Net — now superseded by OpenTelemetry SDKs/ADOT for the same languages, per the instrumentation story above.
- Application code (Java, .NET, Node.js) sends data through the X-Ray daemon and SDK, while other clients (scripts and tools) send data via AWS SDKs or the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI); both paths flow through the X-Ray API into the X-Ray console.
- Integrates with: Amazon EC2 (applications deployed on instances), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), and Amazon API Gateway.
- Distinct from Amazon Cloudtrail, which audits and logs account API calls, and from Amazon Cloudwatch, which tracks metrics, logs, and billing alarms — X-Ray traces a request’s path through an application’s own components rather than auditing account activity or monitoring infrastructure metrics.
- X-Ray is transitioning to OpenTelemetry (OTel) as its primary instrumentation standard. The original X-Ray SDKs and X-Ray Daemon entered maintenance mode on February 25, 2026 (security patches only) and are scheduled to reach end-of-support on February 25, 2027.
- New and existing applications are recommended to instrument with OpenTelemetry SDKs or the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT), and to collect data with the OpenTelemetry Collector or the CloudWatch agent (which can now receive OTel traces directly) instead of the X-Ray Daemon.
- X-Ray now sits alongside CloudWatch Application Signals as part of the broader Amazon Cloudwatch observability suite: OTel/ADOT-instrumented traces can flow into X-Ray (for the existing Traces and Trace Map console experience) and into Application Signals (for unified application health, latency, and dependency monitoring), so migrating off the X-Ray SDK does not change the CloudWatch console experience.