AWS Open Source Blog

AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry adds partner exporters for metrics and traces

Today’s release of AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) 0.7.0 adds support for four more partner monitoring solutions—Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, and Splunk—enabling customers to send correlated metrics and traces using OpenTelemetry. These partner exporters are available now in addition to exporters for AWS monitoring services, such as Amazon CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray, and Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP). Customers can also use OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) exporters to send data to partners such as Lightstep, Honeycomb, Sumo Logic, and others.

ADOT is a secure, production-ready, AWS-supported distribution of the OpenTelemetry project. OpenTelemetry, the second most popular open source project after Kubernetes in the CNCF world, provides open source APIs, libraries, and agents to collect distributed traces and metrics for application monitoring. With ADOT, you can instrument your applications once for sending correlated metrics and traces to multiple monitoring solutions. You can use auto-instrumentation agents to collect traces without changing your code. ADOT also collects metadata from your AWS resources and managed services, so you can correlate application and infrastructure performance data, reducing the mean time to problem resolution. You can also use ADOT to instrument your applications running on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and on-premises.

Datadog

The Datadog exporter can send both metrics and trace data gathered by the OpenTelemetry Collector to Datadog’s monitoring service end-point. This exporter can process application traces along with a batch processor to be set up with a timeout of 10 seconds. For processing application metrics, the exporter needs a couple of values to be configured for each setup: delta_ttl and send_monotonic_counters. This exporter also needs a Datadog API token for authentication.

Dynatrace

The Dynatrace exporter is a metrics exporter that sends metrics gathered by the OpenTelemetry Collector to the Dynatrace backend service endpoint. To configure the Dynatrace exporter, a Dynatrace API Token and metrics ingest endpoints are required.

New Relic

The New Relic exporter can send trace and metrics data gathered by the OpenTelemetry Collector to the New Relic backend service end-point. You need to have a valid API key to connect successfully with the service backend. A timeout of 15 seconds to the default and can be tuned based on the amount of data that will be processed.

Splunk

Splunk has two exporters bundled in this release of ADOT: the SAPM exporter and the SignalFx exporter. Both require valid access tokens for backend services they connect to. The SAPM exporter processes traces using a Jaeger proto with additional batching processing. This allows the OpenTelemetry Collector to export traces from multiple nodes in a single batch. Additional configurations can be found in GitHub. Splunk’s SignalFx exporter takes metrics data gathered by the Collector and exports this data to the Splunk service backend. This exporter can also correlate traces from the SAPM exporter with the metrics it receives to send to the Splunk SignalFx service backend. Configuration details can be found in GitHub.

Predictable performance

The AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry distribution comes fully tested using an open source framework for integration, performance, and benchmark testing of these partner exporters to ensure predictable resource utilization and performance. All components are also security tested to provide users the risk mitigation they expect from AWS products and services. Our partners including Dynatrace, Datadog, Grafana, Honeycomb, LightStep, New Relic, Splunk, Sumo Logic, and others have worked closely with us on performance and security testing of components in the distribution.

Download now

You can read about AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry on the AWS Open Source Blog, where we announced its availability for public preview in October 2020 followed by a re:Invent release in December 2020 with an OTLP exporter, Lambda integration for Python, and SDK enhancements. You can find extensive technical documentation at the ADOT developer site, and download the distribution releases from GitHub. We also welcome you to participate in the OpenTelemetry project.

Alolita Sharma

Alolita Sharma

Alolita is a senior manager at AWS where she leads open source observability engineering and collaboration for OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Cortex, Grafana. Alolita is co-chair of the CNCF Technical Advisory Group for Observability, member of the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee and a board director of the Unicode Consortium. She contributes to open standards at OpenTelemetry, Unicode and W3C. She has served on the boards of the OSI and SFLC.in. Alolita has led engineering teams at Wikipedia, Twitter, PayPal and IBM. Two decades of doing open source continue to inspire her. You can find her on Twitter @alolita.

Nizar Tyrewalla

Nizar Tyrewalla

Nizar Tyrewalla is a Principal Product Manager in AWS focused on monitoring distributed applications built using microservices architecture. Currently, he is leading the distributed tracing service with AWS X-Ray and ingestion of Observability data using open source tools and frameworks like OpenTelemetry.