AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry unifies ingestion with OpenTelemetry Protocol Exporter

In October of 2020, AWS launched support for AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT), a secure, production-ready open-source distribution of the OpenTelemetry collector with reliable performance. The OpenTelemetry (OTel) collector is a vendor-agnostic way to receive, process and export telemetry data. At the time ADOT was launched, OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) was still in its early days. The OTLP specification describes the encoding, transport, and delivery mechanism of telemetry data between telemetry sources, intermediate nodes such as collectors and telemetry backends. The OTLP Exporter is a component of ADOT that supports configuration options available for OTLP as well as the retry behavior. OTLP and the OTLP Exporter helps standardize how data can be exported from ADOT to a customer or an AWS Partner destination ensuring minimal security risks and more reliable support that AWS customers expect from ADOT.

The only methods of integration with ADOT to export data will be a. OTLP Exporter, b) AWS Exporters such as Amazon CloudWatch Embedded Metric Format (EMF) via logs and AWS X-Ray, and c) other open source Exporters such as Prometheus, File and Logging.

We plan to migrate all partner integrations to OTLP by end of 2023 and will keep you updated on next steps. The process will be as follows:

1. We add instructions how to use the OTLP Exporter for partners who have not yet covered this.
2. We provide a per-partner deprecation timeline via the ADOT docs.
3. By January 2024, the ADOT distribution will no longer include some of the existing custom exporters.

If you have any questions, please contact us on the CNCF Slack in the #opentelemetry channel or create an issue against the AWS OTel community repo.