AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry distribution
An AWS-supported distribution of OpenTelemetry (SDKs, collector) to collect traces and metrics once and send them to multiple destinations such as X-Ray, CloudWatch, Managed Prometheus, or third-party tools.
- Cost$ Low
- Difficulty●●●●●
- Costs money when idle?No
- Self-managed
Think of it asLike a standard sensor kit that plugs into many different monitoring systems.
When to use it
✓ Use it when
You want to instrument apps using an open standard without vendor lock-in.
✗ Avoid it when
Only need basic logs and metrics → CloudWatch agent.
Common uses
- Microservice tracing sent to X-Ray
- Collect EKS metrics into Managed Prometheus
- Auto-instrumentation Lambda layer
What does it cost?
- Pricing model: No separate charge; you pay for the compute running the collector and the destination services receiving data.
