AWS Cloud Operations Blog
Announcing AWS X-Ray SDKs/Daemon End-of-Support and OpenTelemetry Migration
The SDKs and Daemon for AWS X-Ray will enter maintenance mode on February 25, 2026 and reach end-of-support on February 25, 2027. Guidance for migrating to OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation solutions allows you to continue producing traces for your applications within AWS.
Existing applications that use X-Ray SDKs and Daemon for AWS X-Ray will continue to function as intended. Between February 25, 2026 and February 25, 2027, the X-Ray SDKs and Daemon will only receive critical bug fixes and security updates, and will not be updated to support new features. For instance, the SDKs will not receive additional Library Instrumentations or enhancements to existing Library Instrumentations.
The following table outlines the level of support for each phase of the X-Ray SDKs and Daemon lifecycle.
| SDK Lifecycle Phase | Start Date | End Date | Support Level |
| General Availability | N/A | February 25, 2026 | During this phase, the SDKs and Daemon are fully supported. AWS will provide regular SDK/Daemon releases that include bug and security fixes. |
| Maintenance mode | February 25, 2026 | February 25, 2027 | AWS will limit SDK and Daemon releases to address critical bug fixes and security issues only. The SDKs/Daemon will not receive new feature enhancements. |
| End-of-support | February 25, 2027 | N/A | The SDKs and Daemon will no longer receive updates or releases. Previously published releases will continue to be available via public package managers and the code will remain on GitHub. |
AWS X-Ray is transitioning to OpenTelemetry as its primary instrumentation standard for application tracing and observability. We recommend you to migrate to OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation solutions to produce traces from your applications and send them to AWS X-Ray, where your console experience will remain the same.
OpenTelemetry is the industry-wide open-source standard for tracing instrumentation and observability, providing IT teams with standardized protocols and tools for collecting and routing telemetry data. It delivers a unified format for instrumenting, generating, gathering, and exporting application telemetry data, such as metrics, logs, and traces to monitoring platforms for analysis and insights. This means faster feature development and a broader set of tools and integrations that are consistent across the industry. OpenTelemetry Instrumentation solutions provide broader support for framework and library instrumentation, more language support, and zero-code instrumentation capabilities.
To help with the migration, you can find migration guidance and examples in the AWS X-Ray Documentation.
When you migrate to AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) or native OpenTelemetry with Amazon CloudWatch, you will gain access to powerful tools such as CloudWatch Application Signals for enhanced application health monitoring, and Transaction Search for complete visibility into your application’s transaction spans.
To learn more about OpenTelemetry as well as leveraging more software solutions from AWS CloudWatch that utilizes OpenTelemetry, refer to the following resources:
- Amazon CloudWatch with OpenTelemetry explains how you can use CloudWatch with your application with OpenTelemetry, and enable powerful tools such as Application Signals and Transaction Search
- Migrating from X-Ray to OpenTelemetry instrumentation provides examples on how to switch to using AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) or OpenTelemetry SDKs
- Official OpenTelemetry documentation explains all the know-hows of using OpenTelemetry
Feedback
If you need assistance or have feedback, reach out to AWS support.
You can also open a discussion or issue on GitHub (Java, Python, JavaScript, .NET, Go, and Ruby). Thank you for using AWS X-Ray SDKs and Daemon for AWS X-Ray.