Running the X-Ray daemon on Amazon EC2 - Amazon X-Ray
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Running the X-Ray daemon on Amazon EC2

Note

X-Ray SDK/Daemon Maintenance Notice – On February 25th, 2026, the Amazon X-Ray SDKs/Daemon will enter maintenance mode, where Amazon will limit X-Ray SDK and Daemon releases to address security issues only. For more information on the support timeline, see X-Ray SDK and Daemon Support timeline. We recommend to migrate to OpenTelemetry. For more information on migrating to OpenTelemetry, see Migrating from X-Ray instrumentation to OpenTelemetry instrumentation .

You can run the X-Ray daemon on the following operating systems on Amazon EC2:

  • Amazon Linux

  • Ubuntu

  • Windows Server (2012 R2 and newer)

Use an instance profile to grant the daemon permission to upload trace data to X-Ray. For more information, see Giving the daemon permission to send data to X-Ray.

Use a user data script to run the daemon automatically when you launch the instance.

Example User data script - Linux
#!/bin/bash
curl https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/aws-xray-assets.us-east-2/xray-daemon/aws-xray-daemon-3.x.rpm -o /home/ec2-user/xray.rpm
yum install -y /home/ec2-user/xray.rpm
Example User data script - Windows server
<powershell>
if ( Get-Service "AWSXRayDaemon" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue ) {
    sc.exe stop AWSXRayDaemon
    sc.exe delete AWSXRayDaemon
}

$targetLocation = "C:\Program Files\Amazon\XRay"
if ((Test-Path $targetLocation) -eq 0) {
    mkdir $targetLocation
}

$zipFileName = "aws-xray-daemon-windows-service-3.x.zip"
$zipPath = "$targetLocation\$zipFileName"
$destPath = "$targetLocation\aws-xray-daemon"
if ((Test-Path $destPath) -eq 1) {
    Remove-Item -Recurse -Force $destPath
}

$daemonPath = "$destPath\xray.exe"
$daemonLogPath = "$targetLocation\xray-daemon.log"
$url = "https://s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/aws-xray-assets.us-west-2/xray-daemon/aws-xray-daemon-windows-service-3.x.zip"

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $url -OutFile $zipPath
Add-Type -Assembly "System.IO.Compression.Filesystem"
[io.compression.zipfile]::ExtractToDirectory($zipPath, $destPath)

New-Service -Name "AWSXRayDaemon" -StartupType Automatic -BinaryPathName "`"$daemonPath`" -f `"$daemonLogPath`""
sc.exe start AWSXRayDaemon
</powershell>