AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry — Now with Splunk Observability Support!

Back in October, we announced the Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector Distribution, which offered the industry’s first production-ready support for OpenTelemetry. This distribution is the recommended way that customers of Splunk’s award-winning observability products capture metrics and traces. In addition, customers can also send data to our observability products with their own distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector or SDKs via the Splunk exporters, or with third-party distributions like AWS’, for which we announced a partnership last November. Today, we are excited to announce the release of AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry with full Splunk Observability support!

AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry allows customers to capture metadata from AWS resources and managed services to correlate application performance data with underlying infrastructure data. Customers can instrument applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon container services — ECS and EKS, and on-premises. With the announcement today, Splunk’s Observability exporters are certified and fully supported by AWS — to seamlessly send observability data to Splunk’s Infrastructure Monitoring and APM solutions.

Why Distributions?

You may be wondering why a distribution instead of just using the upstream open-source software. Distributions provide several advantages including:

• The best user experience: instrumentation and data collection can be challenging to configure properly. Distributions offer ways to make it easier to leverage OpenTelemetry quickly without building and packaging each component yourself.
• Optimized configuration: ensures telemetry data is generated, collected, processed, and sent according to best practices.
• Production support: all code contributions are upstreamed and go through robust security validation and integration tests. In addition, customers can open support tickets directly with AWS or Splunk.
  
  

Of course, you always have the opportunity to build your own OpenTelemetry components from OSS source, and all of AWS instrumentation and Splunk exporters that are contained within both the Splunk and AWS distributions are available upstream in OpenTelemetry. Doing this does require more familiarity with OpenTelemetry to select and build the components that your application needs.

Looking Ahead

OpenTelemetry has continued to gain support and adoption of its open-source and vendor-agnostic solution to observability data. Today, it is home to the second-largest number of contributors in the CNCF and Splunk is one of the biggest contributors to the project. The GA of tracing will occur shortly in OpenTelemetry, and a GA release of metrics will be available later this year. In addition, communities including Jaeger, Prometheus, and Spring are working together with OpenTelemetry to provide best of breed observability solutions.

Get Started with Production-Grade Observability

We are excited to partner with AWS on their production-ready AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry; we also look forward to accelerating our joint customers’ observability journey. For information on getting started with Splunk and AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry, check out our getting started guides:

• Splunk APM (SAPM) exporter
• Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring (SignalFx) exporter