Tracing, one of the Three Pillars of Observability, is an important insight into the performance of your AWS serverless functions. It can tell you when tasks, both inside and outside your app, are taking too long and slowing down your serverless applications. However, this metric can be time-consuming and difficult to implement; figuring out where to put, start, and end traces is a task upon itself (though well worth it), and then you have to instrument your code to match.

It is with this in mind that we’re beyond excited to launch the Auto-Tracing feature for our Node.JS and Python agents. Right now, you can set up IOpipe to automatically trace one of the more common causes for performance issues in serverless applications — HTTP/S requests. When configured for your function, you will receive automatically-generated traces of all of your HTTP/S requests, like the invocation below using the Python agent:

In order to utilize Auto-Tracing for HTTP/S requests, you’ll need to make sure you’re running the following agents for Node.JS or Python, and follow the configuration options at the link, as this feature is currently disabled by default:

Node.JS tracing plugin @iopipe/trace@^1.2.0, configuration instructions

Python agent v1.7.0+, configuration instructions

We’ll be expanding the Auto-Tracing feature as we move forward, but we’re very excited to be the vanguard and bring you some of the first automated serverless code-tracing that the market has to offer.

Interested in trying this out? We have a free 21-day trial! You can also ask questions and join in on the discussion in our community Slack.