Feature request: HTTP request/response annotations

[revmischa]

Use case

I have a nextjs CDK construct with a simple APIGW lambda wrapper around nextjs. I want to annotate my traces with HTTP request and response metadata, e.g. "URL" and "method" and "status code"

I would like to use it here: https://github.com/jetbridge/cdk-nextjs/blob/main/assets/lambda/NextJsHandler.ts#L45

I'd like to see the status code, path, method, etc in xray:

Solution/User Experience

Perhaps something like traceRequestResponseCycle in https://docs.aws.amazon.com/xray-sdk-for-nodejs/latest/reference/AWSXRay.html

Alternative solutions

Discussed on discord: https://discord.com/channels/1006478942305263677/1006527385409179678/1042309163818168380

Acknowledgment

• This feature request meets Lambda Powertools Tenets
• Should this be considered in other Lambda Powertools languages? i.e. Python, Java

[dreamorosi]

Hi @revmischa thank you for taking the time to open a feature request.

As I have briefly mentioned on Discord: at the moment we don't use any of the middleware features from aws-xray-sdk so I'm unsure on how it will behave with Tracer. With that said, a first cursory look at traceRequestResponseCycle's implementation suggests that the utility provides some syntactic sugar around segment manipulation/annotation, which bodes well for Powertools compatibility.

Before considering the feature and putting it into the backlog, I would like some investigation to take place to make a small PoC and understand the impact and compatibility of this feature with Powertools.

Like with all features, contributions are more than welcome, and in case this is left to the maintainers, having 👍 on the feature request will help increasing its priority in our backlog.

If anyone is interested in picking up this issue, please leave a comment below to express your interest and agree on next steps. The maintainers will be happy to support you with clearing doubts or questions on the scope and codebase.

[revmischa]

For my purposes a simpler version of this would be to let me manually set the HTTP path, method, status code directly on the segment. But I have no idea how to do this and couldn't find any documentation on how to manually set those attributes.

[kennethwkz-mm]

this is https://www.npmjs.com/package/aws-xray-sdk-express feature, this is very useful when we are tracing some ip address or api URL in a easy way

[dreamorosi]

FYI @revmischa, I have been looking at the aws-sdk-for-nodejs implementation to see if I could find a way to make it work for Tracer without changes but didn't have much luck.

I'll keep looking, also using the example that was just posted above.

[revmischa]

Please keep open

[dreamorosi]

With the upcoming Event Handler feature incoming, we'll need a way to add these annotations to segments generated by Tracer.

I've been looking at the implementation more closely and I think that we should implement a version of this method so that the http field of the X-Ray segment data is populated as described in the original post.

I'm adding this to the backlog so we can work on it at some point in the coming months.

The issue is open for contributions. If you’re interested, please leave a comment before starting a PR. Let’s discuss and agree on a design for the new feature before implementing it. I don’t want to expose the method as-is from the X-Ray SDK.

[VatsalGoel3]

Hi @dreamorosi,

I’d love to take on this feature request and implement HTTP metadata annotation for X-Ray segments in the Tracer utility.