---
title: "Tracing with X-Ray"
chapter: true
weight: 245
draft: false
tags:
  - advanced
  - operations
  - monitoring
  - CON205
---

# Tracing with X-Ray

As [distributed systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing) evolve, monitoring and debugging services becomes challenging. Container-orchestration platforms like Kubernetes solve a lot of problems, but they also introduce new challenges for developers and operators in understanding how services interact and where latency exists. [AWS X-Ray](https://aws.amazon.com/xray/) helps developers analyze and debug distributed services.

In this module, we are going to deploy the [X-Ray agent](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/xray/latest/devguide/xray-daemon.html) as a [DaemonSet](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/daemonset/), deploy sample front-end and back-end services that are instrumented with the [X-Ray SDK](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/xray/index.html#lang/en_us), make some sample requests and then examine the traces and service maps in the AWS Management Console.

![GitHub Edit](/images/x-ray/overview.png)