Overview

AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry Collector(AWS OTel Collector) is a AWS supported version of the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector and is distributed by Amazon. It supports the selected components from the OpenTelemetry community. It is fully compatible with AWS computing platforms including EC2, ECS and EKS. It enables users to send telemetry data to AWS CloudWatch Metrics, Traces and Logs backends as well as the other supported backends.

Getting Help

Use the community resources below for getting help with AWS OTel Collector.

• Use GitHub issues for reporting bugs and requesting features.
• Join our GitHub Community for AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry to ask your questions, file issues, request enhancements.
• Open a support ticket with AWS Support.
• If you think you may have found a bug, open an issue.
• For contributing guidelines refer CONTRIBUTING.md.

AWS OTel Collector Built-in Components (in 2020)

This table represents the supported components of AWS OTel Collector in 2020. The highlighted components below are developed by AWS in-house. The rest of the components in the table are the essential default components that AWS OTel Collector will support.

Receiver	Processor	Exporter	Extensions
prometheusreceiver	attributesprocessor	awsxrayexporter	healthcheckextension
otlpreceiver	resourceprocessor	awsemfexporter	pprofextension
awsecscontainermetricsreceiver	queuedprocessor	prometheusexporter	zpagesextension
	batchprocessor	loggingexporter
	memorylimiter	otlpexporter
	tailsamplingprocessor	fileexporter
	probabilisticsamplerprocessor	otlphttpexporter
	spanprocessor	datadogexporter
	filterprocessor	dynatraceexporter
	metricstransformprocessor	newrelicexporter
		sapmexporter
		signalfxexporter

AWS OTel Collector AWS Components

• OpenTelemetry Collector
• Trace X-Ray Exporter
• Metrics EMF Exporter
• ECS Container Metrics Receiver

Getting Started

Prerequisites

To build AWS OTel Collector locally, you will need to have Golang installed. You can download and install Golang here.

AWS OTel Collector Configuration

We built in a default configuration to our docker image and other format of release. So you can run AWS OTel Collector out of box with the default settings. Also, AWS OTel Collector configuration uses the same configuration syntax/design from OpenTelemetry Collector so you can customize or porting your OpenTelemetry Collector configuration files when running AWS OTel Collector. please refer Try out AWS OTel Collector section on configuring AWS OTel Collector.

Try out AWS OTel Collector

AWS OTel Collector supports all AWS computing platforms and docker/kubernetes. Here are some examples on how to run AWS OTel Collector to send telemetry data:

• Run it with Docker
• Run it with ECS
• Run it with EKS
• Run it on AWS Linux EC2
• Run it on AWS Windows EC2
• Run it on AWS Debian EC2

Build Your Own Artifacts

Use the following instruction to build your own AWS OTel Collector artifacts:

• Build Docker Image
• Build RPM/Deb/MSI

Release Process

• Release new version

Benchmark

AWS OTel Collector is based on the upstream open-telemetry-collector. Here is the benchmark of AWSXRay trace exporter and AWSEMF metrics exporter.

This table shows the performance of AWSEMF exporter against 1kData/sec, 5kData/sec, and 10kData/sec metrics:

Test	Result	Duration	CPU Avg%	CPU Max%	RAM Avg MiB	RAM Max MiB	Sent Items	Received Items
Metric1kDPS/AWSEmf	PASS	16s	6.1	8.6	31	38	105000	105000
Metric5kDPS/AWSEmf	PASS	15s	14.3	17.1	38	42	256110	256110
Metric10kDPS/AWSEmf	PASS	16s	25.8	27.0	43	58	491100	491100

This table shows the performance of AWSXray exporter against 1kData/sec,5kData/sec and 10kData/sec spans(traces).

Test	Result	Duration	CPU Avg%	CPU Max%	RAM Avg MiB	RAM Max MiB	Sent Items	Received Items
Trace1kSPS/AwsXray	PASS	15s	8.5	11.6	32	36	15000	15000
Trace5kSPS/AwsXray	PASS	15s	26.12	27.8	33	38	74400	74400
Trace10kSPS/AwsXray	PASS	15s	43.8	45.3	37	43	132500	132500

License

AWS OTel Collector is licensed under an Apache 2.0 license.