CloudWatch gains OpenTelemetry metrics
AWS added native OpenTelemetry metrics support in CloudWatch to simplify observability for cloud applications. The announcement positions OpenTelemetry as a first‑class ingestion path for CloudWatch metrics amid ongoing discussions about S3 Files and monitoring. (x.com)
OpenTelemetry is a common way to label and ship telemetry — the health data apps emit while they run. Amazon Web Services said on April 2 that Amazon CloudWatch can now take OpenTelemetry metrics directly in a public preview. (aws.amazon.com) Before this change, teams often had to convert OpenTelemetry metrics into Amazon’s Embedded Metric Format or route them through extra tooling before CloudWatch could use them. Amazon Web Services’ own AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry docs describe that older path through an Embedded Metric Format exporter. (aws-otel.github.io) The new path uses the OpenTelemetry Protocol, or OTLP, which is the standard wire format for moving metrics, logs, and traces between tools. Amazon CloudWatch documentation now says custom metrics can be published through OTLP or the CloudWatch application programming interface. (docs.aws.amazon.com) Amazon Web Services says those OpenTelemetry metrics can be queried with Prometheus Query Language, the syntax many engineers already use with Prometheus. CloudWatch’s OpenTelemetry documentation says metrics, logs, and traces now share a common attribute model inside the service. (docs.aws.amazon.com) That puts metrics alongside two OpenTelemetry paths CloudWatch already exposed more clearly: logs searchable in CloudWatch Logs Insights and traces viewable through Transaction Search. The same documentation page describes native support across all three signal types. (docs.aws.amazon.com) Amazon had already added OpenTelemetry on the way out of CloudWatch in December 2023, when CloudWatch Metric Streams gained OpenTelemetry Protocol 1.0.0 output. The April 2026 preview adds OpenTelemetry as a direct ingestion path into CloudWatch itself. (aws.amazon.com) The company is also tying the new metrics path to Kubernetes monitoring. On April 2, Amazon Web Services launched Container Insights with OpenTelemetry metrics for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service in a separate public preview. (aws.amazon.com) That Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service feature sends cluster metrics to CloudWatch over OTLP every 30 seconds and enriches each metric with as many as 150 labels, including Kubernetes metadata and customer-defined tags. Amazon Web Services said the add-on builds on open source and Amazon collectors already used in many clusters. (aws.amazon.com) For Amazon Web Services customers that already alert, autoscale, and dashboard in CloudWatch, the change reduces the amount of translation between open source instrumentation and Amazon’s native monitoring service. In CloudWatch’s own docs, the service now presents OpenTelemetry as a built-in route for metrics rather than a sidecar workaround. (docs.aws.amazon.com)
