How do I set up AWS X-Ray SQL Instrumentation for Hikari based projects without using Tomcat JDBC?

It turns out that someone else had this question. The AWS developers have been working on this in a feature branch that got merged in Novemeber 2019 for SDK version 2.3.0.

I am yet to find any documentation for this new feature, so after some digging into the PR code, I managed to find that it's even more simple than the previous implementation.

Simply add the following dependency instead of the postgres specific one to your build.gradle file (or similar):

    implementation "com.amazonaws:aws-java-sdk-core:2.4.0"
    implementation "com.amazonaws:aws-xray-recorder-sdk-core:2.4.0"
    implementation "com.amazonaws:aws-xray-recorder-sdk-sql:2.4.0"

Then simply create a TracingDataSource object in your DataSource configuration, and pass it your original javax.sql.DataSource object. This should be done in whatever @Configuration annotated class you use to create your DataSource bean.

    @Bean(name = "dataSource")
    @Primary
    @ConfigurationProperties(prefix = "spring.datasource")
    public DataSource dataSource() {
        final DataSource dataSource = DataSourceBuilder
                .create()
                .username(getUsername())
                .password(getPassword())
                .url(POSTGRES_URL_PREFIX
                        + getHost()
                        + ":" + getPort()
                        + "/" + getName()
                        + "?stringtype=unspecified")
                .driverClassName(getDriver())
                .build();

        final TracingDataSource tracingDataSource = new TracingDataSource(dataSource);
        return tracingDataSource;
    }

That's all there is to it. I really hope this helps someone as I spent many hours trying to get this to work without Tomcat, plus the AWS documentation doesn't help here either.

J Hamm's answer definitely provided a good starting point but I didn't want to manually set DataSourceBuilder properties. Additionally, Hikari specific properties were not being set for me. I ended up with following:

    @Bean
    @Primary
    @ConfigurationProperties("spring.datasource")
    //DataSourceProperties will convert `spring.datasource.url` property to hikari's jdbcUrl property
    public DataSourceProperties dataSourceProperties() {
        return new DataSourceProperties();
    }

    @Bean(name = "hikariDataSource")
    @ConfigurationProperties(prefix = "spring.datasource.hikari")//set hikari specific properties
    public HikariDataSource hikariDataSource(DataSourceProperties properties) {
        return properties.initializeDataSourceBuilder().type(HikariDataSource.class).build();
    }

    @Bean(name = "dataSource")
    @Primary
    public DataSource dataSource(HikariDataSource hikariDataSource) {
        //wrap the spring ds into xray tracing ds
        var tracingDataSource = new TracingDataSource(hikariDataSource);
        return tracingDataSource;
    }

Unfortunately all this ended up being wasted effort because x-ray doesn't record executed SQL statements making it almost useless. See https://github.com/aws/aws-xray-sdk-java/issues/28

Resolved the same using TracingDataSource, while still using HikariCP as the connection pool

Reference https://github.com/aws/aws-xray-sdk-java/issues/88#issuecomment-570328275

Code: (Note, I am using AWS Secrets Manager JDBC Library aws-secretsmanager-jdbc to connect to the database using secrets stored in AWS Secrets Manager)

import com.amazonaws.xray.sql.TracingDataSource;

...
...
@Bean
    @ConfigurationProperties(prefix = "spring.datasource")
    public DataSource dataSource() {

        return TracingDataSource
                .decorate(DataSourceBuilder.create()
                        .driverClassName("com.amazonaws.secretsmanager.sql.AWSSecretsManagerPostgreSQLDriver")
                        .url("jdbc-secretsmanager:postgresql://" + System.getenv("PGHOST") + ":"
                                + System.getenv("PGPORT") + "/" + System.getenv("PGDATABASE"))
                        .username(System.getenv("SECRET_NAME")).build());

    }

Dependency:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.amazonaws</groupId>
    <artifactId>aws-xray-recorder-sdk-sql</artifactId>
</dependency>