AWS X-Ray centralized dashboard across accounts

Danushka Fernando
3 min readFeb 1, 2020

This is a continuance of my last post[1]. As I mentioned there not only logs, if you are using other tools also its nicer to mange the data published by them from a single account. Today’s post is about having centralized x-ray dashboard. According to the x-ray daemon[2] the way mentioned is to configure the RoleArn value in the x-ray config. This role should be allowed to be assumed by users that daemon is running in. But the issue here could be sometimes you may be running your service with assumed credentials already and in this case it will be hard to give permission to the role in the shared account to be assumed. This case is specially valid when your are deploying x-ray daemon in EKS environment.

So easiest way to get through this is to set AWS keys in environment variables of the x-ray daemon. I deployed in EKS and this is the configuration I used to deploy x-ray in EKS. You maybe need to add keys as secrets. Here for simplicity I just put them to envs.

# Copyright 2018 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. All Rights Reserved.
#
# Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License").
# You may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
# A copy of the License is located at
#
# http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
#
# or in the "license" file accompanying this file. This file is distributed
# on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either
# express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing
# permissions and limitations under the License.
apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
labels:
app: xray-daemon
name: xray-daemon
namespace: default
---
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
name: xray-daemon
labels:
app: xray-daemon
roleRef:
apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
kind: ClusterRole
name: cluster-admin
subjects:
- kind: ServiceAccount
name: xray-daemon
namespace: default
---
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: DaemonSet
metadata:
name: xray-daemon
spec:
updateStrategy:
type: RollingUpdate
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: xray-daemon
spec:
volumes:
- name: config-volume
configMap:
name: xray-config
hostNetwork: true
containers:
- name: xray-daemon
image: {{ .Values.xrayImage }}
env:
- name: REGION
value: {{ .Values.region }}
- name: AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
value: {{ .Values.sharedLogUserKey }}
- name: AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
value: {{ .Values.sharedLogUserSecret }}

imagePullPolicy: Always
command: [ "/usr/bin/xray", "-c", "/aws/xray/config.yaml" ]
resources:
limits:
memory: 24Mi
ports:
- name: xray-ingest
containerPort: 2000
hostPort: 2000
protocol: UDP
volumeMounts:
- name: config-volume
mountPath: /aws/xray
readOnly: true
---
# Configuration for AWS X-Ray daemon
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
name: xray-config
data:
config.yaml: |-
# Maximum buffer size in MB (minimum 3). Choose 0 to use 1% of host memory.
TotalBufferSizeMB: 0
# Maximum number of concurrent calls to AWS X-Ray to upload segment documents.
Concurrency: 8
# Send segments to AWS X-Ray service in a specific region
Region: ""
# Change the X-Ray service endpoint to which the daemon sends segment documents.
Endpoint: ""
Socket:
# Change the address and port on which the daemon listens for UDP packets containing segment documents.
# Make sure we listen on all IP's by default for the k8s setup
UDPAddress: 0.0.0.0:2000
Logging:
LogRotation: true
# Change the log level, from most verbose to least: dev, debug, info, warn, error, prod (default).
LogLevel: prod
# Output logs to the specified file path.
LogPath: ""
# Turn on local mode to skip EC2 instance metadata check.
LocalMode: false
# Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the AWS resource running the daemon.
ResourceARN: ""
# Assume an IAM role to upload segments to a different account.
RoleARN: ""
# Disable TLS certificate verification.
NoVerifySSL: false
# Upload segments to AWS X-Ray through a proxy.
ProxyAddress: ""
# Daemon configuration file format version.
Version: 1
---
# k8s service definition for AWS X-Ray daemon headless service
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: xray-service
spec:
selector:
app: xray-daemon
clusterIP: None
ports:
- name: incoming
port: 2000
protocol: UDP

Hope I solved someone’s problems. Good luck!!!

References

[1] https://medium.com/@wdfdo1986/aws-deployment-publish-logs-to-central-log-account-with-efk-c59315a8a455

[2] https://github.com/aws/aws-xray-daemon

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