AWS Application Signals data source
The AWS Application Signals data source plugin lets you query and visualize AWS Application Signals services and AWS X-Ray traces in Grafana. Use it to explore distributed traces, inspect service maps, monitor service-level objectives (SLOs), and correlate application signals with the rest of your observability data.
This plugin was formerly named the AWS X-Ray data source.
Supported features
Note
Annotations in the table refers to Grafana dashboard annotations, which are event markers overlaid on panels. This data source doesn’t support them.
It’s different from X-Ray trace annotations, which are key-value pairs attached to trace segments by the AWS X-Ray SDK and used in filter expressions (for example,
annotation.account = "12345"). X-Ray trace annotations are fully supported in Trace queries.
Get started
The following documents help you get started:
- Configure the AWS Application Signals data source
- AWS Application Signals query editor
- Alerting with the AWS Application Signals data source
- Template variables
- Troubleshoot AWS Application Signals data source issues
Additional features
After you configure the data source, you can:
- Use Explore to query data without building a dashboard.
- Apply Transformations to manipulate query results.
- Build alert rules on numeric Trace Statistics queries.
- Visualize service maps in the Node graph panel.
Pre-built dashboards
The plugin ships with an X-Ray App Signals dashboard that fetches services and their associated CloudWatch metrics for user-selected Application Signals and CloudWatch data sources. The dashboard lets you pick a service, service operation, or service dependency and inspect the related CloudWatch metrics.
To use the dashboard, you must have Application Signals enabled in your CloudWatch account and select the appropriate Application Signals and CloudWatch data sources and region in the dashboard variables.
To import the dashboard:
- Click Connections in the left-side menu.
- Click Data sources and select your AWS Application Signals data source.
- Select the Dashboards tab.
- Find X-Ray App Signals and click Import.
For more information about Application Signals and how to enable it in AWS, refer to the AWS Application Signals documentation.
Plugin updates
Always ensure that your plugin version is up-to-date so you have access to all current features and improvements. Navigate to Plugins and data > Plugins to check for updates. Grafana recommends upgrading to the latest Grafana version, and this applies to plugins as well.
Note
Plugins are automatically updated in Grafana Cloud.
