How to make X-Ray traces clickable from CloudWatch logs insights?

[softwareengineerprogrammer]

I recently integrated powertools logging into my Python app, and love that it automatically instruments xray_trace_id in my cloudwatch logs. However, it would be significantly more useful to be able to click the trace ID in order to view the full trace, as CW dashboards supports when the trace ID is instrumented as @xrayTraceId, and is done automatically for REPORT events.

Examples - xray_trace_id not clickable in CW dashboard logs widget for an event logged by powertools:

@xrayTraceId clickable for REPORT event:

What do I need to do to achieve clickable xray traces for all events as shown in the second image?

---

Edit: In the meantime, I created a workaround in the form of a Tampermonkey userscript that adds a link for xray_trace_id entries. install | source

[leandrodamascena]

Hey @softwareengineerprogrammer! If you want that CW Logs Dashboard render the TracerId with a link to Tracer, then you need to log the field X-Amzn-Trace-Id as part of your log line. In this way CW will detect this field and render this as @xRayTracerId. With Powertools you have some ways to do that.

1 - Adding this as an extra key. You must take care to get _X_AMZN_TRACE_ID from the env, it changes on every Lambda run and it doesn't matter if this is a new container or not, so put this inside the Lambda handler.

import os
from aws_lambda_powertools import Logger

logger = Logger()

def lambda_handler(event: dict, context: LambdaContext) -> str:
	mylog = {
	    "X-Amzn-Trace-Id": os.getenv("_X_AMZN_TRACE_ID")
	}
	
	logger.info("Message",**mylog)

2 - Creating a CustomFormatter and injecting this key

import os
from aws_lambda_powertools import Logger
from aws_lambda_powertools.logging.formatter import LambdaPowertoolsFormatter
from aws_lambda_powertools.logging.types import LogRecord


class CustomFormatter(LambdaPowertoolsFormatter):
    def serialize(self, log: LogRecord) -> str:
        """Serialize final structured log dict to JSON str"""
        log["X-Amzn-Trace-Id"] = os.getenv("_X_AMZN_TRACE_ID")
        return self.json_serializer(log)


logger = Logger(service="payment", logger_formatter=CustomFormatter())
logger.info("hello")

3 - I do no advice you to use append_keys method because you need to get a new value on every execution.

Please ping me if you have any additional question.

[softwareengineerprogrammer]

Thank you @leandrodamascena! I haven't had time to incorporate your answer into my code yet but I really appreciate it.