Choose an interface - Amazon X-Ray
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Choose an interface

Amazon X-Ray can provide insights into how your application works and how well it interacts with other services and resources. After you instrument or configure your application, X-Ray collects trace data as your application serves requests. You can analyze this trace data to identify performance issues, troubleshoot errors, and optimization your resources. This guide shows you how to interact with X-Ray with the following guidelines:

  • Use an Amazon Web Services Management Console if you want to get started quickly or can use pre-built visualizations to perform basic tasks.

    • Choose the Amazon CloudWatch console for the most updated user experience that contains all of the X-Ray console’s functionality.

    • Use the X-Ray console if you want a simpler interface or don’t want to change how you interact with X-Ray.

  • Use an SDK if you need more custom tracing, monitoring or logging capabilities than an Amazon Web Services Management Console can provide.

    • Choose the ADOT SDK if you want a vendor-agnostic SDK based on the open source OpenTelemetry SDK with added layers of Amazon security and optimization.

    • Choose the X-Ray SDK if you want a simpler SDK or don’t want to update your application code.

  • Use X-Ray API operations if an SDK does not support your application’s programming language.

The following diagram helps you choose how to interact with X-Ray:

X-Ray displays detailed information about application requests.