Canaries and X-Ray tracing

You can choose to enable active AWS X-Ray tracing on canaries that use the syn-nodejs-2.0 or later runtime. With tracing enabled, traces are sent for all calls made by the canary that use the browser, the AWS SDK, or HTTP or HTTPS modules. Canaries with tracing enabled appear on the X-Ray Trace Map, and within Application Signals after you have enabled it for your application.

When a canary appears on the X-Ray trace map, it appears as a new client node type. You can hover on a canary node to see data about latency, requests, and faults. You can also choose the canary node to see more data at the bottom of the page. From this area of the page, you can choose View in Synthetics to jump to the CloudWatch Synthetics console for more details about the canary, or choose View Traces to see more details about the traces from this canary's runs.

A canary with tracing enabled also has a Tracing tab in its details page, with details about traces and segments from the canary's runs.

Enabling tracing increases canary run time by 2.5% to 7%.

A canary with tracing enabled must use a role with the following permissions. If you use the console to create the role when you create the canary, it is given these permissions.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "Sid230934",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "xray:PutTraceSegments"
            ],
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

Traces generated by canaries incur charges. For more information about X-Ray pricing, see AWS X-Ray Pricing.