OpenTelemetry Metrics (Recommended) - Amazon CloudWatch
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OpenTelemetry Metrics (Recommended)

OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that provides vendor-agnostic instrumentation for collecting metrics, logs, and traces from your applications. Amazon CloudWatch supports OpenTelemetry natively, enabling you to use community-standard SDKs and collectors to send metrics directly to CloudWatch without vendor lock-in.

With OpenTelemetry metrics in CloudWatch, you get:

  • No vendor lock-in – Instrument once with OTel SDKs, send to CloudWatch or any OTel-compatible backend. Switch destinations with a config change, not a code change.

  • Open-source native metric names – Use community-standard metric names (for example, container_cpu_usage_seconds_total from cAdvisor) instead of proprietary names. Existing PromQL dashboards and runbooks work as-is.

  • PromQL querying – Query with the industry-standard Prometheus Query Language. No proprietary query syntax needed.

  • High cardinality at low cost – Up to 150 labels per data point with per-GB pricing. No penalty for adding pod names, request IDs, or custom tags.

  • Unified telemetry pipeline – The same OTel Collector that collects your metrics can also collect logs and traces, simplifying your observability stack.

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