Michael Gerstenhaber

Datadog has a long-standing commitment to open standards. Our integrations with OpenMetrics, JMX, and WMI, as well as our implementation of the tried-and-true StatsD protocol, enable you to collect data with the tools and libraries that fit best into your workflows. The source code for the Datadog Agent, as well as for our distributed tracing libraries, is open source and available on GitHub, and we are proud of our ongoing partnership with the OpenTelemetry project, which is a unified, vendor-agnostic set of tools for collecting system and application telemetry data.

That’s why we’re excited to support the public preview of AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry, which enables customers to send metrics and traces to any supported monitoring backend, including Datadog. By embracing open standards and providing data portability, AWS and Datadog are helping users improve their monitoring workflows, regardless of their architectures.

AWS extends the CNCF OpenTelemetry project

AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry extends the upstream CNCF OpenTelemetry project by collecting metadata from AWS resources, as well as trace data from AWS SDK and AWS X-Ray. The SDKs, auto-instrumentation agents, and collectors that comprise the distribution have been carefully optimized, secured, and tested by AWS to ensure that they don’t degrade the performance or stability of your systems.

AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry collects metrics and traces from your instrumented applications, encodes this data according to OTLP specifications, and then sends it to any supported backend service. This flexible approach to telemetry collection helps customers get deep visibility into the health and performance of their applications while leveraging the monitoring solution that works best for them.

Configure AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry to send data to Datadog

You can easily configure AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry to send metrics and traces to Datadog by adding a datadog exporter to your OpenTelemetry configuration YAML file along with your Datadog API key, as shown below. The site parameter is optional and is only necessary for sending data to the Datadog EU site.

datadog:
  api:
    key: "<API_KEY>"
    site: datadoghq.eu

If you plan to collect traces, you will also need to include a batch processor in your configuration file, as demonstrated below. This will send batches of trace data to Datadog every 10 seconds in order to ensure efficient and accurate trace metrics processing.

processors:
  batch:
    timeout: 10s

For more information on setting up the Datadog exporter, refer to the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry documentation, as well as the Datadog documentation.

A bright future for open standards

Our contributions to OpenTelemetry have helped countless organizations to auto-instrument their applications across multiple languages and frameworks, no matter which monitoring solution they use. By packaging AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry with a Datadog exporter, AWS has further broken down barriers to data portability, making it possible for Datadog customers to easily view metrics and traces collected by the distribution alongside monitoring data from our 1,000+ integrations. We’re thrilled to be partnering with AWS on OpenTelemetry, and we can’t wait to see what the future holds for open source and open standards.

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