Tracing with X-Ray

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.

Go to the CloudFormation console. You should see all 8 stacks, 7 of them nested.

Click on the Lab primary stack (the only one without NESTED), and then navigate to the Outputs tab and open the ImagetrendsAppUrl in a new tab

  1. Generate traffic on the application that has been deployed

    • Log in to ImageTrends using the URL that you made a note of earlier (CloudFormation Output).
    • Enter admin@admin.com for email
    • Enter Password123 for Password
    • Click Login
    • Download the Sample Photos zip file
    • Click Upload Image
    • Use one of the images that you downloaded in the Success Photos folder
    • Repeat a few times to generate some data

  2. Navigate to X-Ray

    • Navigate to the AWS X-Ray console
    • Start typing X-Ray in the AWS Services search box
    • Select X-Ray

  3. Explore the Service Map

    Your service Map may not populate immediately, use the refresh icon in the top right or wait for the map to auto refresh.  
     
    If you do not see data that you are expecting, try changing the time from Last 5 minutes in the top right to 30 minutes.

    Deploy Lab

  4. View Traces

    • Click on the imagetrends circle
    • Click on the View traces button
    • Click on a Trace list ID
    • Review the trace details
    • Click Analytics in the navigation menu on the left
    • Scroll down to Response Time Root Cause
    • Select Rekognition (AWS::Rekognition)
    • Change the time from Last 5 minutes to see further back.

Your application has been pre-configured to provide additional tracing telemetry with X-Ray.