AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry

Introduction

Introduction

Welcome to the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) technical docs. 

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To send OpenTelemetry data to Amazon CloudWatch, AWS now recommends the CloudWatch agent or any OpenTelemetry Collector exporting to the CloudWatch OTLP endpoints. The ADOT SDKs and auto-instrumentation remain supported, and they power CloudWatch Application Signals, the CloudWatch application performance monitoring (APM) feature. Application Signals uses the traces and metrics that the ADOT SDKs collect to show the health, latency, and errors of your services.

About

AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) is a secure, production-ready, AWS-supported distribution of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) OpenTelemetry project. OpenTelemetry (OTel) provides open source APIs, libraries, and agents to collect logs, metrics, and traces.

With ADOT, you can instrument your applications once and send correlated logs, metrics, and traces to one or more observability backends such as Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon OpenSearch Service, any OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) compliant backend, as well as Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK).

The ADOT Collector is one way to route this telemetry. For Amazon CloudWatch, you can instead use the CloudWatch agent or any OpenTelemetry Collector with the CloudWatch OTLP endpoints, or export traces and logs directly from the ADOT SDKs (collector-less telemetry).

Further, you can use auto-instrumentation to generate traces without changing your code. ADOT also collects metadata from your AWS resources and managed services, so you can correlate application performance data with underlying infrastructure data, reducing the mean time to problem resolution.

Use ADOT to instrument your applications running on AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) on EC2, and AWS Fargate, as well as in your on-premises datacenter.

Features

  • Instrument your applications once and send correlated logs, metrics, and traces to one or more observability backends and use auto-instrumentation for traces without changing your code.
  • Collect metadata from your AWS resources and managed services, so you can correlate application performance data with underlying infrastructure data, reducing the mean time to problem resolution.
  • Enables you to observe your applications running on AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) on EC2, and AWS Fargate, as well as in hybrid cloud and on-prem settings.

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