AWS X-Ray SDKs/Daemon migration to OpenTelemetry

AWS X-Ray is transitioning to OpenTelemetry as its primary instrumentation standard for application tracing. OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation solutions are recommended for producing traces from applications and sending them to AWS X-Ray. X-Ray’s existing console experience and functionality continuous to be fully supported and remains unchanged by this transition.

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.

The AWS X-Ray SDKs and Daemon set are transitioning to maintenance mode. During this phase, AWS will limit SDK and Daemon releases to address security issues only. The SDKs/Daemon will not receive new feature enhancements. Even in maintenance mode, X-Ray will continue to accept and process traces from existing X-Ray SDKs and Daemon. The AWS X-Ray service remains fully supported and continues to be enhanced with new features like native OpenTelemetry support and Amazon CloudWatch Transaction Search. Transaction Search offers a new cost effective pricing with all of X-Ray capabilities bundled along with Application Performance Monitoring or Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals feature set. New feature development will focus on OpenTelemetry-based solutions, while existing functionality will continue to work as expected. 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.

To help with the migration, you can find migration guidance and examples in the AWS X-Ray Documentation.

• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/xray/latest/devguide/xray-sdk-migration.html

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.

• https://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/

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.