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. Jonathan Lee, software development engineer for AWS, and Naina Thangaraj, senior product manager at AWS, explain:
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.
AWS X-Ray is a distributed and managed tracing service that helps developers analyze, debug, and visualize how requests travel through applications. The service is designed for workloads built with microservices, serverless functions, or containerized architectures.
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. Lee and Thangaraj add:
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.
Developers can use either the CloudWatch agent or the OpenTelemetry collector to collect traces from their instrumented applications and send them to X-Ray. Luc van Donkersgoed, principal engineer at PostNL and AWS Serverless Hero, comments:
OpenTelemetry is awesome, and AWS knows it. The X-Ray SDKs and Deamon are now deprecated in favor of modern, open standards. I hope to see many more OTel features released this Re:Invent!
The post sparked a discussion among practitioners about the cold-start overhead of the ADOT Lambda layer for serverless deployments and how ADOT increases memory requirements for small functions.
The documentation explains how developers can use Amazon CloudWatch with their applications with OpenTelemetry, enabling tools like Application Signals and Transaction Search. Application Signals provides a unified, application-centric view of applications, services, and dependencies, helping developers monitor and triage application health. Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, comments:
AWS is deprecating X-Ray SDKs for OpenTelemetry, which is actually the right move, because open standards beat vendor lock-in. But calling it a "migration" when you're giving customers two years to rewrite their instrumentation? That's just deprecation with better PR. Still, Google'd give you a month if you're lucky.
AWS produced a guide to help developers migrate from X-Ray to OpenTelemetry instrumentation.