Posted On: Apr 12, 2022

AWS App Runner now supports streaming all request traces of applications running on App Runner to AWS X-Ray. App Runner makes it easy for developers to quickly deploy containerized web applications and APIs to the cloud, at scale and without having to manage infrastructure. X-Ray support in App Runner enables measuring these applications’ performance as they interact with AWS data services such as Amazon RDS, DynamoDB, or Elasticache, or with applications running on ECS, EKS, or Fargate. Further, this launch enables App Runner users to use X-Ray to get an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through your application, and gain insights to identify issues or optimization opportunities.

If your application is already instrumented for tracing with OpenTelemetry, you can simply enable X-Ray tracing for your App Runner service without making any changes to your application. Otherwise, you first need to instrument your application with AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT). ADOT is a secure, production-ready, AWS-supported distribution of the OpenTelemetry project. You then simply enable X-Ray tracing from App Runner console when you create an App Runner service for your application. When using App Runner API or AWS CLI, you can enable this feature by specifying ObservabilityConfiguration parameter object while creating a new service or updating an existing service.

For more information, see tracing App Runner application with X-Ray developer guide and this blogpost. To learn more about App Runner, see the AWS App Runner Developer Guide.