Integrating SpringCloudSleuth With AWS X-Ray - spring-boot

Question

I've an ECS cluster running Fargate instances with Springboot apps & want to enable tracing with least number of code changes. There're the two approaches I started looking at:
Use AWS-Xray : Steps -> Add dependencies, add aWSXRayServletFilter, run X-Ray daemon in a separate container.
Use Spring Cloud Sleuth : Steps -> Add dependency & property, integrate with X-Ray
So the second approach saves you number of steps in modifying your code, the issues is I couldn't find any good doc to integrate Spring Cloud Sleuth with X-Ray, can anyone point me to correct direction?
I tried reading number of docs including: https://cloud.spring.io/spring-cloud-sleuth/spring-cloud-sleuth.html

Answer 1

I came across this when looking for a solution for option two. AFAIK, you still have to use the X-Ray daemon. I had to look across multiple GitHub repos and issues to solve the problem so am providing the solution here.
I used Gradle for my solution but this can be easily translated to Maven as well.
Add the BOM for spring cloud
dependencyManagement {
imports {
mavenBom("org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-dependencies:2021.0.3")
}
}
Add the following dependencies to the project.
implementation 'org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-starter-sleuth'
implementation 'org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-sleuth-zipkin'
implementation 'io.zipkin.aws:zipkin-reporter-xray-udp:0.23.4'
Then Add configuration to define the Bean which is used for reporting to the X-Ray daemon.
#Configuration
public class TracingConfiguration {
#Bean(ZipkinAutoConfiguration.REPORTER_BEAN_NAME)
Reporter<Span> reporter() {
return XRayUDPReporter.create();
}
}
Define the propagation type as aws for Sleuth as per the documentation.
spring.sleuth.propagation.type=aws

Answer 2

I haven't tried it yet, but from the documentation you can combine the following
An amazon/aws-xray-daemon
zipkin-aws with the experimental X-Ray Storage. They have a Docker image for zipkin-aws. You need to point it to the XRay daemon. This will be running as a Zipkin server listening on port 9411.
Then you use Spring Cloud Sleuth's instrumentation and AsyncZipkinSender.
By doing this approach, you can decouple yourself from AWS as long as you have a different zipkin server.

Answer 3

currently AWS X-Ray SDK doesn't have integration with Spring Cloud Sleuth. In order to using AWS X-Ray, the first approach would be the best way to do it.