A really useful information to have while debugging applications is an end-to-end request id.

To be able to achieve that you need not only NGINX but also application changes, to forward the ids but also to log them. On this post, I would like to share how to implement the NGINX side.

One way to achieve that is setting a header for both the client side and to the upstream called X-Request-ID for example.

The behavior expect is that, if X-Request-ID is set, NGINX will forward the same value to the next upstream, if the header is not set, NGINX will generate a random request identifier and add it to the request.

To achieve that we use a map configuration as can be seen in the following configuration.

On my previous implementation, we used a Lua piece of code to generate the unique request identifier, and this had specific formatting similar to:

12345678-1234-1234-1234-1234

To guarantee backward compatibility, I used an NGINX map to format the $request_id variable to a format that matches my old setup.

Using map, you can apply regular expressions to variables and transform the variables based on the regular expression.

This is one of the many reasons why I think map is one of the most versatile and powerful configuration options for NGINX.

I hope this helps you!