Configuring the OpenTelemetry Collector for X-Ray remote Sampling

Enable awsproxy extension

Note that in order to use X-Ray remote sampling, your application's tracer must use an X-Ray sampler. Today the X-Ray sampler is available for the following:

• ADOT Java agent
• ADOT Java SDK
• ADOT Go SDK

Enable the extension by adding this snippet to your collector configuration.

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extensions:
  awsproxy:
service:
  extensions: [awsproxy]

For example, a full configuration that receives spans as OTLP, exports to X-Ray, and enables remote sampling may look like this.

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receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      grpc:
exporters:
  awsxray:
extensions:
  awsproxy:
service:
  extensions: [awsproxy]
  pipeline:
    traces:
      receivers: [otlp]
      exporters: [awsxray]

This enables the proxy listening on the default endpoint of 0.0.0.0:2000 - SDK sampling extensions for X-Ray remote sampling connect to localhost:2000 by default and will work out of the box when deploying the collector as a sidecar.

The full list of configuration options can be found in the component documentation.

Once you have enabled the proxy extension and configured the remote sampler in your application, you can follow the AWS X-Ray documentation to define custom sampling rules for incoming requests and see them applied across your entire fleet.

The IAM policy used with the collector also needs permission to fetch sampling rules. This policy would allow the collector to export trace data and fetch sampling rules.

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{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "xray:PutTraceSegments",
                "xray:PutTelemetryRecords",
                "xray:GetSamplingRules",
                "xray:GetSamplingTargets",
                "xray:GetSamplingStatisticSummaries"
            ],
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

Warning: The proxy extension allows any application with network connectivity to the collector to send requests to X-Ray without authentication. If not using any other authentication mechanism in front of the collector, it is recommended to configure network policy to only allow network connectivity to applications that should be allowed to access X-Ray with the above IAM permissions, for example using network firewall rules.

OTel Remote Sampling Implementation Caveats

To note that X-Ray Sampling attributes can be configured from AWS X-Ray Console shown in below image.

Below mentioned table displays X-Ray sampling attributes and X-Ray equivalent OTel sampling attributes used by the OTel remote sampling implementation. Here's how you can configure X-Ray sampling attributes in AWS X-Ray Console. Below mentioned caveats to keep in mind when using OTel remote sampling implementation.

1. Some of the X-Ray equivalent OTel sampling fields are instrumentation specific like http.target, http.url, http.method and http.host. If instrumentation you're using in your application won't set them then remote sampling implementation would not have all these fields to match against in that case it would only use resource attributes like service.name and cloud.platform
2. Sampling implementation would match URLPath (X-Ray sampling attribute set on AWS X-Ray Console) with http.target as well as http.url and if it finds a match with one of them it would consider matched