Tracing calls to downstream HTTP web services with the X-Ray SDK for Go

Note

End-of-support notice – On February 25th, 2027, AWS X-Ray will discontinue support for AWS X-Ray SDKs and daemon. After February 25th, 2027, you will no longer receive updates or releases. For more information on the support timeline, see X-Ray SDK and daemon end of support timeline. We recommend to migrate to OpenTelemetry. For more information on migrating to OpenTelemetry, see Migrating from X-Ray instrumentation to OpenTelemetry instrumentation .

When your application makes calls to microservices or public HTTP APIs, you can use the xray.Client to instrument those calls as subsegments of your Go application, as shown in the following example, where http-client is an HTTP client.

The client creates a shallow copy of the provided HTTP client, defaulting to http.DefaultClient, with roundtripper wrapped with xray.RoundTripper.

main.go – HTTP client

myClient := xray.Client(http-client)

main.go – Trace downstream HTTP call with ctxhttp library

The following example instruments the outgoing HTTP call with the ctxhttp library using xray.Client. ctx can be passed from the upstream call. This ensures that the existing segment context is used. For example, X-Ray does not allow a new segment to be created within a Lambda function, so the existing Lambda segment context should be used.

resp, err := ctxhttp.Get(ctx, xray.Client(nil), url)