AWS and Grafana Labs launch AWS X-Ray data source plugin

Today, AWS and [Grafana Labs](https://grafana.com/) launched an [AWS X-Ray](/xray/) data source plugin. You can use the latest release of Grafana (version 7.2.0 or later) to help visualize your AWS X-Ray traces directly in your Grafana dashboards in order to triage performance issues. AWS X-Ray helps developers and DevOps engineers analyze and debug distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. Grafana is an open source visualization and analytics software. It allows you to query, visualize, alert on, and explore your monitoring data no matter where it is stored. With this launch, you can use the analytics and advanced visualization provided in Grafana through charts, graphs, and alerts to monitor your applications that are instrumented using AWS X-Ray. You can analyze X-Ray traces using Grafana Explore view to triage performance issues, such as increases in error and fault rates, determine the root cause of the issue, and identify the end users who are impacted. With this launch, you can use X-Ray trace data in Grafana dashboards along with the existing alerting and notifications feature in Grafana. You can view the trace timeline to determine the time spent in each service and view the impact of an error in upstream and downstream services. The AWS X-Ray data source is compatible with X-Ray in any AWS Region in which X-Ray is available. For information on X-Ray's availability please refer to the [AWS Region Table](/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regional-product-services/). Read the blog post on [Analyzing and Debugging applications instrumentation with AWS X-Ray using Grafana](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/analyze-debug-applications-aws-x-trace-data-grafana/). To learn more, see [What’s New in Grafana v7.2](https://grafana.com/docs/guides/whats-new-in-v7-2/) or visit the [Grafana documentation](https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/grafana-x-ray-datasource).