If you're interested in distributed system tracing there's a lot going on.<p>As a starting point, I would recommend reading Google's paper on their project "Dapper." [1] It's essentially the core of most distributed tracing systems. At least those I've encountered.<p>There's a lot of tooling out there that take their cues from Dapper. I've recently been looking into integrating OpenZipkin[2] with our systems. I see at as a more viable alternative (no tie in!) to Yet Another Propriety Thing in AWS (YAPTA). There's other as well, like AppDash.<p>Recently there has been a push towards an open-standard for the collection side called OpenTracing[3]. I came across it when investigating LightStep[4]. Ideally that means no vendor lock-in, which of course has lots of knock-on effects.<p>If you know of any, I'd love to be pointed in the direction of _different_ and not just divergent techniques.<p>[1]: <a href="http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/papers/dapper-2010-1.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://zipkin.io" rel="nofollow">http://zipkin.io</a><p>[3]: <a href="http://opentracing.io" rel="nofollow">http://opentracing.io</a><p>[4]: <a href="http://lightstep.com" rel="nofollow">http://lightstep.com</a> - Impressive team behind this.
This blog post has more info: <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-x-ray-see-inside-of-your-distributed-application/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-x-ray-see-inside-of-you...</a><p>I'll be talking about this on the <a href="https://twitch.tv/aws" rel="nofollow">https://twitch.tv/aws</a> stream at 12:30 pacific if you guys want to ask questions / learn more.<p>(I WORK AT AWS)
I haven't used many of the new AWS services. Someone tell me, what's the quality level? I'll be surprised if all the new AWS stuff works that well given how divided their focus must be now.
Turns out X-Ray is <i>sampling</i> service, it drops data. You can use it to debug recurring problems, but it's no use when debugging a particular incident with the customer on the phone. Bummer.<p><i>To provide a performant and cost-effective experience, X-Ray does not collect data for every request that is sent to an application. Instead, it collects data for a statistically significant number of requests. X-Ray should not be used as an audit or compliance tool because it does not guarantee data completeness.</i><p><a href="https://aws.amazon.com/xray/faqs/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/xray/faqs/</a>
Looks like it doesn't support all languages. Not sure if users can contribute plugins.<p>> You can use X-Ray with applications written in Java, Node.js, and .NET that are deployed on these services. Support for AWS Lambda is coming soon.
Honest question: why is there so much AWS news up today? I mean, X-Ray is particularly exciting for me, but there are currently 5/30 stories on the front page which are basically just product announcements. I'm pretty new, but is this normal? I thought the basic upvote criteria was meant to be that we should focus on upvoting articles of some depth as well as interest.
Some have mentioned is this full APM and does this compete with New Relic, Dynatrace, Stackify, Appdynamics, App Insights, etc.<p>Those products are primarily based on code profiling. For example, at Stackify we automatically profile key methods for dozens of common dependencies and frameworks to understand their usage and performance. Every SQL, NoSQL, caching, queuing providers and many other things. Plus app errors, logs, etc.<p>So the best I can tell from the AWS blog and docs is the answer is no its not a full APM. It appears to track how long a web request takes and any usage of the AWS services via their SDK. More of a lightweight service mapping of AWS services. So SQL database or HTTP calls probably aren't tracked.<p>In the future could they expand it? Sure. But for now it seems limited compared to a full blown APM product. Although this could be help for identifying performance problems with AWS services.<p>Matt - Founder of Stackify
Significant blow to all APM players in the space. Approximately 50% of New Relic's revenue comes from AWS. Datadog just announced their distributed tracing system at $25/host. X-Ray is orders of magnitude cheaper than either - and per trace pricing is something that would be very tough for anyone else to do and plays well to Lambda efforts.<p>X-Ray seems like a pretty basic service at this point but in my opinion the writing is on the wall for other APM providers. Amazon chose this announcement for a major slot so I expect they'll be investing in the service. As Bezos is often quoted as saying "your margin is my opportunity."
Incredible. My book talks about writing tests to help build reliable systems but having a dynamic run time tool like this is an astounding addition to a developer's toolset.
Is this offering similar to Azure's Application Insights?<p><a href="https://azure.microsoft.com/pl-pl/services/application-insights/" rel="nofollow">https://azure.microsoft.com/pl-pl/services/application-insig...</a>
Hrmm name collision with Google's previously published XRay function tracing system <a href="http://research.google.com/pubs/pub45287.html" rel="nofollow">http://research.google.com/pubs/pub45287.html</a>
Ugh. Of course I read the comments first to see if the article is worth reading and it takes me 10 minutes to realize this is not Amazon's 3D rendering as a service, service..