X-Ray

Metrics show that something is slow, and logs show what one component did. A trace shows the whole path of a single request as it crosses services. That is what makes it the tool for finding which hop in a distributed system is responsible for latency or an error. AWS X-Ray is the tracing service that collects and displays those traces.

X-Ray covers the tracing concepts, how traces reach the service, and how they are viewed. It also covers the change that matters for anyone starting now: the X-Ray SDKs and daemon have been in maintenance mode since February 2026, and AWS recommends OpenTelemetry for new instrumentation. Traces still end up in X-Ray. What changes is the library used to produce them.