Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion vs AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry

Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion is a managed, serverless service that streams logs, metrics, and traces to OpenSearch Service domains or OpenSearch Serverless collections. Each pipeline has a source, optional ordered processors, and one or more sinks, including another pipeline as a sink. Processing can filter, enrich, transform, normalize, aggregate, and route structured or unstructured data, including textual, numerical, and geospatial content. AWS automatically scales ingestion workloads and manages installation, patching, version upgrades, continuous monitoring, and repair. Users define YAML pipelines through the AWS Console or CLI, set minimum and maximum ingestion OCU capacity, or pause a pipeline; paused pipelines consume no OCUs. Billing is hourly with per-minute granularity for allocated OCUs, with one OCU providing 15 GB RAM and 2 vCPU. Private connectivity is available through VPC access and PrivateLink, or pipelines can use the public internet. Redaction, obfuscation, conditional routing, and a stated 99.9% availability SLA are included.

AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) collects logs, metrics, and traces, with options to send correlated telemetry to one or more observability backends. Applications can be instrumented once, and auto-instrumentation can generate traces without changes to application code. ADOT also gathers metadata from AWS resources and managed services to connect application performance data with infrastructure information. Documented destinations include Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray, Amazon OpenSearch, OTLP-compliant backends, and Amazon MSK. It supports workloads on AWS App Runner, Lambda, EC2, ECS, EKS on EC2, Fargate, and on-premises datacenters. Getting-started guides cover Go, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, .NET, PHP, and Android. The project describes ADOT as backed by AWS Support, testing, and certification, and says it contributes changes and fixes to the OpenTelemetry community. ADOT is free and supports cloud and self-hosted deployment. The download page lists Collector version 0.50.0, released August 25, 2026, under the Apache-2.0 license.