AWS X-Ray collects information about application requests and helps teams inspect traces to find problems and opportunities to optimize. For an individual traced request, it can display request and response details along with calls to AWS resources, microservices, databases, and web APIs. Its trace map lays out clients, front-end services, and backend services to help pinpoint bottlenecks and latency spikes. Applications can send trace data through X-Ray SDKs or APIs, AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry, or CloudWatch Application Signals. AWS integrations can add tracing headers, send data, run the X-Ray daemon, or instrument requests. With Lambda, the daemon can capture invocation details; the SDK can trace outgoing calls and attach annotations and metadata. Sampling defaults to the first request each second plus five percent of additional requests, and rules can be configured. Traces are kept for 30 days and encrypted at rest, optionally with an AWS KMS key. IAM controls API access. X-Ray is cloud-based and supports Linux, macOS, Windows, web, and API. Its listed free allowance covers 100,000 recorded traces and the first 1,000,000 retrieved or scanned monthly; further use is billed by usage. From $5.
Who it is for
X-Ray suits teams that need to trace requests across AWS resources and other services, inspect latency, or analyze application behavior. It supports applications instrumented through AWS options or OpenTelemetry.
What is good
- Trace details include downstream services and data stores.
- Service map helps locate bottlenecks and latency spikes.
- Trace data is encrypted at rest.
- Free monthly trace allowances are listed.
What to know first
- Trace data is retained for 30 days.
- SDK and daemon releases are limited to security fixes from February 25, 2026.
- Additional usage is billed by usage.
Verdict
AWS X-Ray provides request tracing, service maps, and configurable sampling, with multiple instrumentation paths. The planned shift of SDK and daemon releases to security fixes makes its OpenTelemetry migration recommendation an important consideration.
AWS X-Ray plans and pricing
All plansCompared on distributed tracing tools
- Free plan
- No
- OpenTelemetry support
- Yes
- Service map
- Yes
- Tail-based sampling
- Yes
- Trace retention
- 30 days
- Deployment model
- cloud
- Pricing basis
- traces
