CloudWatch adds OpenTelemetry metrics natively
AWS has launched native OpenTelemetry metrics support in CloudWatch, simplifying the collection of standardized telemetry without vendor lock‑in. The native integration removes a step for observability pipelines and makes it easier to send OpenTelemetry‑formatted metrics directly into CloudWatch. This is positioned as a move to streamline monitoring for distributed systems. (x.com)
OpenTelemetry is an open-source way to label application health data so different monitoring tools can read the same metrics. Amazon Web Services said last week that Amazon CloudWatch now accepts those metrics natively in public preview. (aws.amazon.com) Before this change, teams often sent OpenTelemetry metrics through the CloudWatch agent or the Amazon Web Services Distro for OpenTelemetry, which could convert them into Amazon’s Embedded Metric Format. The new setup lets teams send OpenTelemetry Protocol data directly to CloudWatch. (docs.aws.amazon.com) (aws-otel.github.io) (docs.aws.amazon.com) Amazon Web Services said customers can mix their own OpenTelemetry metrics with Amazon Web Services “vended” metrics from more than 70 services and query them with Prometheus Query Language, or PromQL. The company said the feature works without additional agents or code changes for that native metrics path. (aws.amazon.com) (docs.aws.amazon.com) Metrics are the running numbers that show whether software is healthy, like request counts, latency, or error rates. OpenTelemetry gives those numbers a shared format, which lets companies instrument code once and move data between vendors more easily. (docs.aws.amazon.com) CloudWatch had already added OpenTelemetry support in other places, including logs and traces, and Amazon Web Services added OpenTelemetry Protocol 1.0.0 output for CloudWatch Metric Streams in December 2023. The April 2026 launch fills in the metrics-ingestion side inside CloudWatch itself. (docs.aws.amazon.com) (aws.amazon.com 1) (aws.amazon.com 2) Amazon Web Services framed the release around hybrid systems, where one company may run microservices on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and on its own servers at the same time. In that setup, a single OpenTelemetry format can carry metrics from both environments into CloudWatch. (aws.amazon.com) The documentation says OpenTelemetry metrics in CloudWatch support gauge, sum, histogram, and exponential histogram types, with up to 150 labels per metric. Those metrics can also feed PromQL-based CloudWatch alarms through Query Studio or the Prometheus-compatible query application programming interface. (docs.aws.amazon.com) For Amazon, the pitch is that customers can keep using an open standard while staying inside CloudWatch for storage, queries, and alerts. For engineers already instrumenting services with OpenTelemetry, the new path removes one conversion step between the application and the dashboard. (docs.aws.amazon.com) (aws.amazon.com)
