AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry vs rsyslog
AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry
aws-otel.github.iorsyslog
rsyslog.comSide by side
| Figure | AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry | rsyslog |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | €166.58/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 7 |
| Spec score · Telemetry Pipeline Software | 8.1 (#11) | 7.9 (#16) |
| Open source | The project says it follows an upstream-first approach and contributes enhancements, changes, and bug fixes to the OpenTelemetry community. | The project documentation says rsyslog core programs are released under GPLv3, while some runtime files are licensed under LGPL. |
| Purpose | ADOT is an AWS-supported distribution of OpenTelemetry for collecting logs, metrics, and traces. | rsyslog collects, transforms, and routes event data as a high-performance log processing engine. |
Plans
AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry
- AWS Distro for OpenTelemetryFree
rsyslog
- rsyslogFree
- Windows Agent Basic$55, paid once
- Windows Agent Professional$79, paid once
- Windows Agent Enterprise$109, paid once
- Enterprise Support€1,999 a year
- Extended Enterprise Support€3,899 a year
- Unlimited Enterprise Support€19,999 a year
In their own words
AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry
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.
rsyslog
rsyslog is a self-hosted engine for collecting, transforming and routing event data, with a processing model built from inputs, rulesets and actions. The project says it can deliver over one million messages per second to local destinations when processing is limited. Reliability features include on-demand disk spooling, backup destinations and multiple processing threads. Documented outputs include Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Apache Kafka, HTTP endpoints and syslog forwarding. Database outputs cover MariaDB/MySQL and PostgreSQL, with libdbi support for other databases. TLS-protected syslog and forwarding with peer authentication settings are documented. The core programs use GPLv3, while some runtime files use LGPL. rsyslog is developed for Linux, POSIX and related UNIX-like systems, and is available through source, Git, distribution packages and Docker. It does not run natively on Windows; a separate Windows Agent collects Event Logs and local log files and can relay syslog to rsyslog on Linux. The core software is free; paid support is available from €1,999/yr.