Posted On: Feb 17, 2021

Amazon Elasticsearch Service adds Trace Analytics, a new feature for distributed tracing that enables developers and IT operators to find and fix performance problems in distributed applications, leading to faster problem resolution times.  

Trace Analytics enables developers and IT Ops to troubleshoot performance and availability issues in their distributed applications, giving them end-to-end insights not possible with traditional methods of collecting logs and metrics from each component and service individually. By adding trace data to the existing log analytics capabilities of Amazon Elasticsearch Service, customers can use the same service to both isolate the source of performance problems and diagnose their root cause. Trace Analytics supports OpenTelemetry, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project which provides a single set of APIs, libraries, agents, and collector services to capture distributed traces and metrics, enabling customers to leverage Trace Analytics without having to re-instrument they applications.  

Trace Analytics today supports collection of trace data from application libraries and SDK’s that are compatible with the open source OpenTelemetry Collector, including OpenTelemetry SDKs, X-Ray SDKs, Jaeger and Zipkin SDKs. Trace Analytics also integrates with AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry, which is a distribution of OpenTelemetry APIs, SDKs, and agents/collectors. It is a performant and secure distribution of OpenTelemetry supported by AWS. Customers can use AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry to collect traces and metrics for multiple monitoring solutions, including Amazon Elasticsearch Service and AWS X-Ray for trace data, and Amazon CloudWatch for metrics. For more information on configuring and using Trace Analytics, please see documentation.

Trace Analytics is supported on all Amazon Elasticsearch Service domains running Elasticsearch 7.9 or greater, across 24 regions globally: US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon, N. California), AWS GovCloud (US-Gov-East, US-Gov-West), Canada (Central), South America (Sao Paulo), Africa (Cape Town), Middle East (Bahrain), EU (Ireland, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Stockholm, Milan), Asia Pacific (Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, Mumbai, Hong Kong), and China (Beijing – operated by Sinnet, Ningxia – operated by NWCD). Please refer to the AWS Region Table for more information about Amazon Elasticsearch Service availability.