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AWS Distro forOpenTelemetry (ADOT)

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ADOT is AWS’s supported distribution of OpenTelemetry — SDKs and collectors for metrics, logs, and traces that export to CloudWatch Application Signals, X-Ray, AMP, and other backends.

Platform & Operations. Last reviewed July 2026.

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2serious gotchas

1regular gotcha

3tips

Definition

AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) is Amazon’s supported build of the OpenTelemetry project — language SDKs, auto-instrumentation agents, Lambda layers, and the OpenTelemetry Collector distribution configured for AWS. Use ADOT to instrument applications once and export telemetry to CloudWatch Application Signals / X-Ray (traces), CloudWatch metrics/EMF, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP), or third-party OTLP backends.

When to use it

  • Net-new distributed tracing on ECS, EKS, EC2, or Lambda (prefer ADOT over X-Ray SDKs)
  • Dual-export patterns: traces to Application Signals, metrics to AMP
  • Teams standardizing on OpenTelemetry for portability

When not to use it

  • Tiny single-Lambda apps where CloudWatch agent auto-instrumentation / Application Signals defaults already suffice and you will never leave AWS
  • Teams unwilling to operate or upgrade a collector sidecar/DaemonSet

Tips

  • X-Ray SDKs and Daemon entered maintenance mode on February 25, 2026 — migrate to ADOT for new work
  • Enable Transaction Search with Application Signals for full APM
  • Keep collector versions patched; treat ADOT like any other data-plane dependency

Gotchas

Serious

  • 100% sampling through ADOT into Application Signals can dominate CloudWatch spend
  • Misconfigured resource attributes produce UnknownService on the service map

Regular

  • Collector-less OTLP endpoints exist — know when you still need a collector for processing/sampling

Related FactualMinds content

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Widener Library reading room, 1920

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Pictures:James Murray in the Scriptorium (public domain); Card Division of the Library of Congress, 1900–1920 (public domain); Salle des catalogues, Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris, Marie-Lan Nguyen (CC BY 2.0); Copyright card catalog drawer, Michael Holley Swtpc6800 (public domain); Type in sort case, Edinburgh City of Print (CC BY 2.0); Widener Library reading room, 1920 (public domain). Via Wikimedia Commons.