A Deep Dive into Serverless Tracing with AWS X Ray & Lambda

A Deep Dive into Serverless Tracing with AWS X Ray & Lambda. Over the past few weeks I’ve been experimenting with building a Serverless API on AWS with the goal of having everything needed to run a production system. One necessary piece was distributed tracing. While I’d seen a bit of what some non-AWS options had to offer, the extra cost of the services themselves, along with actually getting the data to them, was a bit prohibitive for what I imagined should be possible (and cheaper) with only AWS, which brought me to X Ray.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been experimenting with building a Serverless API on AWS with the goal of having everything needed to run a production system. One necessary piece was distributed tracing. While I’d seen a bit of what some non-AWS options had to offer, the extra cost of the services themselves, along with actually getting the data to them, was a bit prohibitive for what I imagined should be possible (and cheaper) with only AWS, which brought me to X Ray. So, I wanted to see if I could use AWS X Ray to get everything I wanted out of a tracing solution. First, I’ll set some expectations of what I need in a production tracing solution as a goal to orient the research process.

Requirements

1. Distributed tracing. On a high level, I want to see the path of a request from service to service, along with location of errors and details on latency.
2. Internal tracing, or a “flame graph”. I want to be able to see the breakdown of a request inside of a lambda, along with a stack trace when an error occurs. This will also help me spot any parts of my lambda that are running particularly inefficiently.

Setup

First, a standard Serverless project setup and code walk-through. By the way, all the code I used in this post is available here.

npm i -g serverless
sls create --template aws-nodejs --path lambda-demo-api
cd lambda-demo-api && npm init && npm i --save-dev serverless-offline

The file structure of the lambda we’re going to deploy looks like this:

├── anotherFile.js
├── index.js
├── logger.js
├── node_modules
├── package-lock.json
├── package.json
├── serverless.yml
└── utils.js

I’ll be explaining each of these files later on. For now, let’s check out the initial serverless config.

nodejs aws-lambda aws-x-ray aws serverless

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