Posted On: Jan 22, 2021

With Amazon CloudWatch agent, you can now use OpenTelemetry APIs and SDKs to send application telemetry data to CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray. This update enables the agent to receive OpenTelemetry metrics and traces from applications and services running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and is intended for existing CloudWatch agent users who want to begin monitoring applications with OpenTelemetry without installing or configuring multiple agents.
As a project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, OpenTelemetry provides open source APIs and libraries to collect distributed traces and metrics for application monitoring. Instrumenting your applications using the OpenTelemetry SDKs allows you to correlate performance data with underlying infrastructure data, reducing the mean time to problem resolution. CloudWatch agent allows you to collect metrics and traces and send them to CloudWatch and X-Ray. CloudWatch and X-ray provide tools you can use to view, filter, and gain insights into data to monitor your applications, identify issues, and improve performance.
The CloudWatch agent with support for OpenTelemetry APIs and SDKs is available in all regions Amazon CloudWatch is available.

To get started with the latest version of the CloudWatch agent see OpenTelemetry support in the CloudWatch Agent in the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide. Visit our developer portal to learn more about the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. The CloudWatch agent, and OpenTelemetry APIs and SDKs are available for no additional charge. CloudWatch custom metrics and logs standard pricing applies. X-Ray standard pricing applies.

The CloudWatch agent is made available under an open-source license. If you would like to build, customize or contribute to the CloudWatch agent, see the GitHub repository for the latest instructions.