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:
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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.
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Open-source native metric names – Use community-standard metric names (for example,
container_cpu_usage_seconds_totalfrom 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.
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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.
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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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