Amazon CloudWatch now supports OpenTelemetry metrics in public preview

Amazon CloudWatch OpenTelemetry Metrics in Public Preview

Amazon CloudWatch now supports native OpenTelemetry (OTel) metrics in public preview, allowing you to send metrics directly using the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) without custom conversion logic or additional tooling. You can combine your custom OpenTelemetry metrics with AWS vended metrics from over 70 services and query them using PromQL — no additional agents or code changes required.

With native OTel support, teams running microservices on Amazon EKS and on-premises servers can send OTel metrics from both environments directly to CloudWatch. They can correlate application-level metrics like order processing latency from their on-premises services with EKS pod CPU utilization and Application Load Balancer request counts, then use PromQL to build unified dashboards and alarms that span their entire infrastructure. CloudWatch anomaly detection works with OTel metrics, automatically identifying unusual patterns without requiring you to set static thresholds. Query Studio, a new console experience for PromQL, lets you write queries, explore metrics, create alarms, and build dashboards directly in the CloudWatch console.

What to do

• Start sending OpenTelemetry metrics to CloudWatch using OTLP.
• Combine custom and AWS vended metrics for unified monitoring.
• Use PromQL to query and visualize metrics across environments.
• Set up anomaly detection for OTel metrics to identify unusual patterns.
• Explore metrics and build dashboards in Query Studio.

Source: AWS release notes

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