Amazon EC2 and AWS App Mesh - AWS X-Ray

Amazon EC2 and AWS App Mesh

AWS X-Ray integrates with AWS App Mesh to manage Envoy proxies for microservices. App Mesh provides a version of Envoy that you can configure to send trace data to the X-Ray daemon running in a container of the same task or pod. X-Ray supports tracing with the following App Mesh compatible services:

  • Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)

  • Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)

  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

Use the following instructions to learn how to enable X-Ray tracing through App Mesh.

A trace map that shows traces between clients and App Mesh services.

To configure the Envoy proxy to send data to X-Ray, set the ENABLE_ENVOY_XRAY_TRACING environment variable in its container definition.

Note

The App Mesh version of Envoy does not currently send traces based on configured sampling rules. Instead, it uses a fixed sampling rate of 5% for Envoy version 1.16.3 or newer, or a 50% sampling rate for Envoy versions prior to 1.16.3.

Example Envoy container definition for Amazon ECS
{
      "name": "envoy",
      "image": "public.ecr.aws/appmesh/aws-appmesh-envoy:envoy-version",
      "essential": true,
      "environment": [
        {
          "name": "APPMESH_VIRTUAL_NODE_NAME",
          "value": "mesh/myMesh/virtualNode/myNode"
        },
        {
          "name": "ENABLE_ENVOY_XRAY_TRACING",
          "value": "1"
        }
      ],
      "healthCheck": {
        "command": [
          "CMD-SHELL",
          "curl -s http://localhost:9901/server_info | cut -d' ' -f3 | grep -q live"
        ],
        "startPeriod": 10,
        "interval": 5,
        "timeout": 2,
        "retries": 3
      }
Note

To learn more about available Envoy region addresses, see Envoy image in the AWS App Mesh User Guide.

For details on running the X-Ray daemon in a container, see Running the X-Ray daemon on Amazon ECS. For a sample application that includes a service mesh, microservice, Envoy proxy, and X-Ray daemon, deploy the colorapp sample in the App Mesh Examples GitHub repository.

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