Running the X-Ray daemon on AWS Elastic Beanstalk

To relay trace data from your application to AWS X-Ray, you can run the X-Ray daemon on your Elastic Beanstalk environment's Amazon EC2 instances. For a list of supported platforms, see Configuring AWS X-Ray Debugging in the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide.

Note

The daemon uses your environment's instance profile for permissions. For instructions about adding permissions to the Elastic Beanstalk instance profile, see Giving the daemon permission to send data to X-Ray.

Elastic Beanstalk platforms provide a configuration option that you can set to run the daemon automatically. You can enable the daemon in a configuration file in your source code or by choosing an option in the Elastic Beanstalk console. When you enable the configuration option, the daemon is installed on the instance and runs as a service.

The version included on Elastic Beanstalk platforms might not be the latest version. See the Supported Platforms topic to find out the version of the daemon that is available for your platform configuration.

Elastic Beanstalk does not provide the X-Ray daemon on the Multicontainer Docker (Amazon ECS) platform.

Using the Elastic Beanstalk X-Ray integration to run the X-Ray daemon

Use the console to turn on X-Ray integration, or configure it in your application source code with a configuration file.

To enable the X-Ray daemon in the Elastic Beanstalk console

1. Open the Elastic Beanstalk console.

2. Navigate to the management console for your environment.

3. Choose Configuration.

4. Choose Software Settings.

5. For X-Ray daemon, choose Enabled.

6. Choose Apply.

You can include a configuration file in your source code to make your configuration portable between environments.

Example .ebextensions/xray-daemon.config

option_settings:
  aws:elasticbeanstalk:xray:
    XRayEnabled: true

Elastic Beanstalk passes a configuration file to the daemon and outputs logs to a standard location.

On Windows Server Platforms

• Configuration file – C:\Program Files\Amazon\XRay\cfg.yaml

• Logs – c:\Program Files\Amazon\XRay\logs\xray-service.log

On Linux Platforms

• Configuration file – /etc/amazon/xray/cfg.yaml

• Logs – /var/log/xray/xray.log

Elastic Beanstalk provides tools for pulling instance logs from the AWS Management Console or command line. You can tell Elastic Beanstalk to include the X-Ray daemon logs by adding a task with a configuration file.

Example .ebextensions/xray-logs.config - Linux

files:
  "/opt/elasticbeanstalk/tasks/taillogs.d/xray-daemon.conf" :
    mode: "000644"
    owner: root
    group: root
    content: |
      /var/log/xray/xray.log

Example .ebextensions/xray-logs.config - Windows server

files:
  "c:/Program Files/Amazon/ElasticBeanstalk/config/taillogs.d/xray-daemon.conf" :
    mode: "000644"
    owner: root
    group: root
    content: |
      c:\Progam Files\Amazon\XRay\logs\xray-service.log

See Viewing Logs from Your Elastic Beanstalk Environment's Amazon EC2 Instances in the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide for more information.

Downloading and running the X-Ray daemon manually (advanced)

If the X-Ray daemon isn't available for your platform configuration, you can download it from Amazon S3 and run it with a configuration file.

Use an Elastic Beanstalk configuration file to download and run the daemon.

Example .ebextensions/xray.config - Linux

commands:
  01-stop-tracing:
    command: yum remove -y xray
    ignoreErrors: true
  02-copy-tracing:
    command: curl https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/aws-xray-assets.us-east-2/xray-daemon/aws-xray-daemon-3.x.rpm -o /home/ec2-user/xray.rpm
  03-start-tracing:
    command: yum install -y /home/ec2-user/xray.rpm

files:
  "/opt/elasticbeanstalk/tasks/taillogs.d/xray-daemon.conf" :
    mode: "000644"
    owner: root
    group: root
    content: |
      /var/log/xray/xray.log
  "/etc/amazon/xray/cfg.yaml" :
    mode: "000644"
    owner: root
    group: root
    content: |
      Logging:
        LogLevel: "debug"
      Version: 2

Example .ebextensions/xray.config - Windows server

container_commands:
  01-execute-config-script:
    command: Powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File c:\\temp\\installDaemon.ps1
    waitAfterCompletion: 0
 
files:
  "c:/temp/installDaemon.ps1":
    content: |
      if ( Get-Service "AWSXRayDaemon" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue ) {
          sc.exe stop AWSXRayDaemon
          sc.exe delete AWSXRayDaemon
      }

      $targetLocation = "C:\Program Files\Amazon\XRay"
      if ((Test-Path $targetLocation) -eq 0) {
          mkdir $targetLocation
      }

      $zipFileName = "aws-xray-daemon-windows-service-3.x.zip"
      $zipPath = "$targetLocation\$zipFileName"
      $destPath = "$targetLocation\aws-xray-daemon"
      if ((Test-Path $destPath) -eq 1) {
          Remove-Item -Recurse -Force $destPath
      }

      $daemonPath = "$destPath\xray.exe"
      $daemonLogPath = "$targetLocation\xray-daemon.log"
      $url = "https://s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/aws-xray-assets.us-west-2/xray-daemon/aws-xray-daemon-windows-service-3.x.zip"

      Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $url -OutFile $zipPath
      Add-Type -Assembly "System.IO.Compression.Filesystem"
      [io.compression.zipfile]::ExtractToDirectory($zipPath, $destPath)

      New-Service -Name "AWSXRayDaemon" -StartupType Automatic -BinaryPathName "`"$daemonPath`" -f `"$daemonLogPath`""
      sc.exe start AWSXRayDaemon
    encoding: plain
  "c:/Program Files/Amazon/ElasticBeanstalk/config/taillogs.d/xray-daemon.conf" :
    mode: "000644"
    owner: root
    group: root
    content: |
      C:\Program Files\Amazon\XRay\xray-daemon.log

These examples also add the daemon's log file to the Elastic Beanstalk tail logs task, so that it's included when you request logs with the console or Elastic Beanstalk Command Line Interface (EB CLI).