Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics strengthens end-to-end canary run debugging with X-Ray traces
Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics enhances its debugging capability by embedding AWS X-Ray traces to help you trace ‘ canary runs’ and determine the root cause of the failure. When a canary has tracing enabled, traces are sent for calls made by the canary. Canaries with tracing enabled appear on the service map in both CloudWatch ServiceLens and in AWS X-Ray, even when they don't send requests to other services or applications that have tracing enabled.
Canaries are configurable scripts that run on a schedule, to monitor your endpoints and APIs. Canaries follow the same routes and perform the same actions as a customer, which makes it possible for you to continually verify your customer experience even when you don't have any customer traffic on your applications.
With this feature, you can get an end-end view of your applications to help identify root causes of failed canary runs. Further, it provides a complete picture of all the services invoked in the path. To get started using AWS X-Ray with Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics, enable the ‘active tracing’ option on the create canary page, for your applications being monitored by Synthetics canaries. Enabling active tracing, adds a new ‘traces’ tab to the canary details page. This tab enables you to select the traces associated with a failed canary run and helps determine the root cause of the failure and identify the services impacted. Canaries that you create with CloudWatch Synthetics also appear on the ServiceLens Service map, which highlights the latency and errors associated with each canary run.
This feature is available in all the 24 AWS Regions where CloudWatch Synthetics is available. To learn more about this feature, see the AWS CloudWatch Synthetics documentation. For pricing, please refer to the Amazon CloudWatch pricing.