Modifying the code snippet to configure the CloudWatch RUM web client (optional)

You can modify the code snippet before inserting it into your application, to activate or deactivate several options. For more information, see the CloudWatch RUM web client documentation.

There are four configuration options that you should definitely be aware of, as discussed in these sections.

Preventing the collection of resource URLs that might contain personal information

By default, the CloudWatch RUM web client is configured to record the URLs of resources downloaded by the application. These resources include HTML files, images, CSS files, JavaScript files, and so on. For some applications, URLs may contain personally identifiable information (PII).

If this is the case for your application, we strongly recommend that you disable the collection of resource URLs by setting recordResourceUrl: false in the code snippet configuration, before inserting it into your application.

Manually recording page views

By default, the web client records page views when the page first loads and when the browser's history API is called. The default page ID is window.location.pathname. However, in some cases you might want to override this behavior and instrument the application to record page views programmatically. Doing so gives you control over the page ID and when it is recorded. For example, consider a web application that has a URI with a variable identifier, such as /entity/123 or /entity/456. By default, CloudWatch RUM generates a page view event for each URI with a distinct page ID matching the pathname, but you might want to group them by the same page ID instead. To accomplish this, disable the web client's page view automation by using the disableAutoPageView configuration, and use the recordPageView command to set the desired page ID. For more information, see Application-specific Configurations on GitHub.

Embedded script example:

cwr('recordPageView', { pageId: 'entityPageId' });

JavaScript module example:

awsRum.recordPageView({ pageId: 'entityPageId' });

Enabling X-Ray end-to-end tracing

When you create the app monitor, selecting Trace my service with AWS X-Ray enables the tracing of XMLHttpRequest and fetch requests made during user sessions that are sampled by the app monitor. You can then see traces from these HTTP requests in the CloudWatch RUM dashboard, and the X-Ray Trace Map and Trace details pages.

By default, these client-side traces are not connected to downstream server-side traces. To connect client-side traces to server-side traces and enable end-to-end tracing, set the addXRayTraceIdHeader option to true in the web client. This causes the CloudWatch RUM web client to add an X-Ray trace header to HTTP requests.

The following code block shows an example of adding client-side traces. Some configuration options are omitted from this sample for readibility.

<script>
    (function(n,i,v,r,s,c,u,x,z){...})(
        'cwr',
        '00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000',
        '1.0.0',
        'us-west-2',
        'https://client.rum.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/1.0.2/cwr.js',
        {
            enableXRay: true,
            telemetries: [ 
                'errors', 
                'performance',
                [ 'http', { addXRayTraceIdHeader: true } ]
            ]
        }
    );
</script>

For more information, see the CloudWatch RUM web client documentation

Sending unsigned requests to CloudWatch RUM

By default, the RUM web client signs all requests sent to RUM. If you set signing:false in the client configuration, requests will be unsigned when they are sent to CloudWatch RUM. Data will be ingested to RUM only if there is a public resource based policy attached to the app monitor. For more information, see Using resource-based policies with CloudWatch RUM.