Amelia Wilson   •   over 8 years ago

Tracing requests through API Gateway and Lambda

Hi. I'm trying to use X-Ray to trace requests that go through API Gateway to Lambda functions. There are a few unclear issues:

1. Should X-Ray be showing the Method and URL of each request in the Traces console? At the moment it seems that this information is blank.

2. Should I be using "Enable active tracing" in Lambda? According to the documentation it seems that API Gateway should be triggering the tracing and this checkbox should be left disabled. But if I disable it, new traces no longer appear in the console.

3. What about scheduled tasks and other AWS event triggered Lambdas (such as DynamoDB and S3 events)? Will X-Ray be able to automatically show the event source in the console, and does the "Enable active tracing" need to be enabled?

I'm using a single Lambda function to handle several API Gateway endpoints and other AWS events, so it would be very helpful in X-Ray to distinguish what purpose the Lambda function is being executed for. I can use the Node X-Ray SDK to add a custom subsegment, but it's not shown as a separate circle in the Service map.

PS. I think X-Ray is a really nice service, I just need to get the integration right.