AWS X-Ray | General

Question 1

What is AWS X-Ray?

General

AWS X-Ray | Developer Tools

Answer 1

AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. With X-Ray, you can understand how your application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors. X-Ray provides an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through your application, and shows a map of your application’s underlying components. You can use X-Ray to analyze both applications in development and in production, from simple three-tier applications to complex microservices applications consisting of thousands of services.

Question 2

Why should I use X-Ray?

General

AWS X-Ray | Developer Tools

Answer 2

Currently, if you build and run distributed applications, you have to rely on a per-service or per-resource process to track requests for your application as it travels across various components that make up your application. This problem is further complicated by the varying log formats and storage mediums across frameworks, services, and resources your application runs on or uses. This makes it difficult to correlate the various pieces of data and create an end-to-end picture of a request from the time it originates at the end-user or service to when a response is returned by your application. X-Ray provides a user-centric model, instead of service-centric or resource-centric model, for collecting data related to requests made to your application. This model enables you to create a user-centric picture of requests as they travel across services and resources. By correlating and aggregating data on your behalf, X-Ray enables you to focus on improving the experience for end-users of your application.