Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Active tracing in Amazon SNS

You can use Amazon X-Ray to trace and analyze user requests as they travel through your Amazon SNS topics to your Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, Amazon Lambda, Amazon SQS, and HTTP/S endpoint subscriptions. Because X-Ray gives you an end-to-end view of an entire request, you can view what is calling your Amazon SNS topic, and what is downstream of your topic's subscriptions. You can analyze latencies in your messages and their backend services (for example, how long a request spends in a topic, and how long it took to deliver the message to each of the topic’s subscriptions).

If you call an Amazon SNS API from a service that's already being traced, Amazon SNS passes the trace through, even if X-Ray tracing isn't enabled on the API.

Amazon SNS supports X-Ray tracing for standard topics only. You can enable X-Ray for an Amazon SNS topic by using the Amazon SNS console, Amazon SNS SetTopicAttributes API, Amazon Simple Notification Service CLI Reference, or Amazon CloudFormation.

To learn more about using Amazon SNS with X-Ray, see Amazon SNS and Amazon X-Ray in the Amazon X-Ray Developer Guide.

Active tracing permissions

When using the Amazon SNS console, Amazon SNS attempts to create the necessary permissions for the Amazon SNS topic to call X-Ray. The attempt can be rejected if you don't have sufficient permissions to use the Amazon SNS console. For more information, see Identity and access management in Amazon SNS and Example cases for Amazon SNS access control.

When using the CLI, you must manually configure the permissions. Those permissions are configured using resource policies. For more on using required permissions in X-Ray, see Amazon SNS and Amazon X-Ray.

Enabling active tracing on an Amazon SNS topic (console)

When active tracing is enabled on an Amazon SNS topic, it reads the trace ID, sends the data to the customer based on the trace ID, and propagates the trace ID to downstream services.

Once you've enabled X-Ray for your Amazon SNS topic, you can use the X-Ray service map to view the end-to-end traces and service maps for the topic.

Enabling active tracing on an Amazon SNS topic (Amazon SDK)

The following code example shows how to enable active tracing on an Amazon SNS topic by using the Amazon SDK for Java.

public static void enableActiveTracing(SnsClient snsClient, String topicArn) {

        try {

            SetTopicAttributesRequest request = SetTopicAttributesRequest.builder()
                .attributeName("TracingConfig")
                .attributeValue("Active")
                .topicArn(topicArn)
                .build();

            SetTopicAttributesResponse result = snsClient.setTopicAttributes(request);
            System.out.println("\n\nStatus was " + result.sdkHttpResponse().statusCode() + "\n\nTopic " + request.topicArn()
                + " updated " + request.attributeName() + " to " + request.attributeValue());

        } catch (SnsException e) {
            System.err.println(e.awsErrorDetails().errorMessage());
        }
    }

Enabling active tracing on an Amazon SNS topic (Amazon CLI)

The following code example shows how to enable active tracing on an Amazon SNS topic by using the Amazon CLI.

aws sns set-topic-attributes \
    --topic-arn arn:aws:sns:us-west-2:123456789012:MyTopic \
    --attribute-name TracingConfig \
    --attribute-value Active

Enabling active tracing on an Amazon SNS topic (Amazon CloudFormation)

The following Amazon CloudFormation stack shows how to enable active tracing on an Amazon SNS topic.

AWSTemplateFormatVersion: 2010-09-09
Resources:
  MyTopicResource:
    Type: 'AWS::SNS::Topic'
    Properties:
      TopicName: 'MyTopic'
      TracingConfig: 'Active'

Verifying active tracing is enabled for your topic

You can use the Amazon SNS console to verify if active tracing is enabled for your topic, or when the resource policy has failed to be added.

Testing active tracing