Tracing calls to downstream HTTP web services with the X-Ray SDK for Go - Amazon X-Ray
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Tracing calls to downstream HTTP web services with the X-Ray SDK for Go

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 .

When your application makes calls to microservices or public HTTP APIs, you can use the xray.Client to instrument those calls as subsegments of your Go application, as shown in the following example, where http-client is an HTTP client.

The client creates a shallow copy of the provided HTTP client, defaulting to http.DefaultClient, with roundtripper wrapped with xray.RoundTripper.

main.go – HTTP client
myClient := xray.Client(http-client)
main.go – Trace downstream HTTP call with ctxhttp library

The following example instruments the outgoing HTTP call with the ctxhttp library using xray.Client. ctx can be passed from the upstream call. This ensures that the existing segment context is used. For example, X-Ray does not allow a new segment to be created within a Lambda function, so the existing Lambda segment context should be used. 

resp, err := ctxhttp.Get(ctx, xray.Client(nil), url)