AWS Distributed Tracing Service X-Ray Transitions to OpenTelemetry

"AWS recently announced that AWS X-Ray is transitioning to OpenTelemetry as its primary instrumentation standard for application tracing, with the AWS X-Ray SDKs and Daemon moving to maintenance mode. The cloud provider now recommends adopting OpenTelemetry as the observability solution for instrumenting cloud applications, with X-Ray transitioning to OpenTelemetry for application tracing and observability. This shift to AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) and OpenTelemetry SDKs aligns AWS with industry best practices."

"It also enables tracing requests across diverse systems, including those outside AWS that could not previously be integrated with X-Ray. OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation solutions are recommended for producing traces from applications and sending them to AWS X-Ray. X-Ray's existing console experience and functionality continuous to be fully supported and remains unchanged by this transition. Developers can use either the CloudWatch agent or the OpenTelemetry collector to collect traces from their instrumented applications and send them to X-Ray."

"The AWS X-Ray SDKs and Daemon will enter maintenance mode on February 25, 2026, after which they will receive only security updates and no new features, and will reach end of support one year later. Even in maintenance mode, X-Ray will continue to accept and process traces from existing X-Ray SDKs and Daemon. The AWS X-Ray service remains fully supported and continues to be enhanced with new features like native OpenTelemetry support and Amazon CloudWatch Transaction Search."

AWS is adopting OpenTelemetry as the primary instrumentation standard for application tracing and recommends OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation for producing and sending traces to X-Ray. The shift to AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) and OpenTelemetry SDKs enables tracing across diverse systems, including non-AWS environments. The X-Ray SDKs and Daemon enter maintenance mode on February 25, 2026, receiving only security updates and reaching end of support one year later. X-Ray will continue to accept traces from existing SDKs, maintain its console experience, and be enhanced with native OpenTelemetry support and CloudWatch Transaction Search. Traces can be delivered via the CloudWatch agent or the OpenTelemetry collector.

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