Dash0’s Website monitoring gives you complete visibility into your application's performance from frontend to backend. By correlating web vitals with backend API calls, you can easily identify customer issues and understand the full user journey.
OpenTelemetry provides well-defined interfaces for end-to-end tracing from client to the backend up until the database using context propagation headers. However, some key AWS services do not make use of this out of the box because of implementation details, specifically the format they use for trace context propagation (see our guide on distributed tracing for more details). Amazon API Gateway, Application Load Balancer and others don't use the W3C TraceContext specification, which OpenTelemetry uses by default: instead, the trace data they generate, which you can get into Dash0 using the Amazon CloudWatch Transaction Search integration, relies on you perform tracing via the AWS X-Ray headers. The outcome is that you may not get the full picture of your application's performance.
To prevent these issues, we've added X-Ray propagation support to our Web SDK, automatically bridging the gap between your frontend and AWS backend services. Now you can trace user interactions seamlessly through your entire AWS-powered application stack, giving you the complete observability you need to deliver exceptional user experiences.
