Generating custom subsegments with the X-Ray SDK for Go - AWS X-Ray

Generating custom subsegments with the X-Ray SDK for Go

Note

End-of-support notice – On February 25th, 2027, AWS X-Ray will discontinue support for AWS X-Ray SDKs and daemon. After February 25th, 2027, you will no longer receive updates or releases. For more information on the support timeline, see X-Ray SDK and daemon end of support timeline. We recommend to migrate to OpenTelemetry. For more information on migrating to OpenTelemetry, see Migrating from X-Ray instrumentation to OpenTelemetry instrumentation .

Subsegments extend a trace's segment with details about work done in order to serve a request. Each time you make a call with an instrumented client, the X-Ray SDK records the information generated in a subsegment. You can create additional subsegments to group other subsegments, to measure the performance of a section of code, or to record annotations and metadata.

Use the Capture method to create a subsegment around a function.

Example main.go – Custom subsegment
func criticalSection(ctx context.Context) { //this is an example of a subsegment xray.Capture(ctx, "GameModel.saveGame", func(ctx1 context.Context) error { var err error section.Lock() result := someLockedResource.Go() section.Unlock() xray.AddMetadata(ctx1, "ResourceResult", result) })

The following screenshot shows an example of how the saveGame subsegment might appear in traces for the application Scorekeep.

Trace timeline showing Scorekeep application segments, including DynamoDB operations and GameModel saveGame subsegment.