AWS X-Ray monitoring integration

New Relic offers an integration for reporting your AWS X-Ray data. This document explains how to activate this integration and describes the data that can be reported.

Activate the integration

To enable the AWS X-Ray integration, follow standard procedures to connect AWS services to infrastructure.

When you've successfully connected your AWS account with New Relic:

Go to one.newrelic.com > All capabilities > Infrastructure, and then click AWS.
Click Manage Services to select the AWS integration you want to activate.
Check the checkbox next to AWS X-Ray.
Click Save.

Configuration and polling

You can change the polling frequency and filter your data using configuration options.

Here's the default polling information for the AWS X-Ray integration:

New Relic polling interval: 5 minutes

Tip

Please allow up to 20 minutes for your first traces to appear. Since traces are collected after they complete, and only once per polling interval, the X-Ray trace data lags real-time considerably, and should not be used for alerting.

Important

Polling intervals longer than 5 minutes may result in lost traces. New Relic drops trace data more than 20 minutes old. Similarly, long-running traces are likely to be incomplete. X-Ray monitoring collects completed traces only, and spans within a trace older than 20 minutes are dropped.

Find and use data

New Relic reports X-Ray segments as Span data. Once you've activated this integration, you should see AWS X-Ray traces appearing in distributed tracing.

To filter your spans, you can use the newRelic.ingestPoint attribute. This attribute is set to xray.polling for all X-Ray spans.

Here's an example NRQL query to verify X-Ray ingest:

SELECT count(*) FROM Span WHERE newRelic.ingestPoint = 'xray.polling' TIMESERIES

Here's an example NRQL query to correlate X-Ray data with specific API performance:

SELECT average(duration.ms) FROM Span WHERE newRelic.ingestPoint = 'xray.polling' 
AND http.url LIKE 'https://yourdomanin.com/api/v1/endpoint%' since 1 month ago 
LIMIT MAX TIMESERIES 1 day

Using custom IAM policies

If you're using a custom IAM policy when connecting your AWS account with the infrastructure agent, your custom policy will need the following permissions for the AWS X-Ray integration to work:

xray:BatchGet*
xray:Get*

X-Ray and Lambda Functions

Lambda functions require some configuration to use X-Ray. See the Using AWS X-Ray section in the AWS Lambda Developer Guide.

In particular, note that the execution role for your Lambda function will need additional permissions to record data to X-Ray.

X-Ray and Step Functions

AWS Step Function state machines are distributed applications, and can be monitored with X-Ray. X-Ray tracing needs to be explicitly enabled for X-Ray to capture data for step function state machines.

Be sure to enable X-Ray tracing for any lambda functions in your state machine as well as for the state machine overall.