Getting started
To get started with OpenTelemetry in CloudWatch, you can use the pre-packaged OpenTelemetry setup that is available with the CloudWatch agent along with the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry SDKs. This gives you the most integrated monitoring experience in CloudWatch.
Alternatively, you have the flexibility to use the OpenTelemetry Collector or your own custom OpenTelemetry Collector to directly send traces to the OTLP endpoint. Make an informed choice based on the feature support:
| Feature | OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib | Custom OpenTelemetry Collector |
|---|---|---|
|
CloudWatch application signals (Application performance metrics, service discovery, and service map) |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Search and analyze spans and trace summaries |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Application performance monitoring telemetry enrichment with AWS infrastructure attributes that your application is hosted in. |
No |
Yes |
|
Runtime metrics correlated with your application. For example, JVM metrics |
No |
Yes |
|
AWS Support |
Data received by AWS |
Data received by AWS |
