AWS X-Ray SDKs/Daemon migration to OpenTelemetry

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For teams already collecting traces with AWS X-Ray SDKs or the daemon, the practical issue is not just replacementโ€”it is migration control. OpenTelemetry changes the instrumentation layer, the export path, and the operational model. That means platform owners need to review where tracing is generated, how it is propagated across services, and whether applications depend on X-Ray-specific libraries, agents, or build-time instrumentation patterns.

Architecture teams should treat this as a standardization exercise. OpenTelemetry can reduce vendor-specific coupling by aligning traces, metrics, and logs around a shared telemetry model, but it also introduces decisions about collector placement, SDK management, and integration with downstream observability tools. In mixed environments, the main technical trade-off is between keeping legacy instrumentation stable and introducing a common telemetry path that can serve multiple teams and platforms.

Operationally, the maintenance-mode signal matters for lifecycle planning. Security fixes may continue, but new framework coverage and feature enhancements will move to OpenTelemetry-based paths. That creates an incentive to test migration in non-critical services first, validate trace fidelity, and confirm that dashboards, alerting, and transaction search workflows still work as expected after the instrumentation change.

For engineering leaders, the key takeaway is governance. A migration like this is easier when observability standards are defined centrally: approved libraries, deployment patterns, collector configuration, and ownership for trace schema consistency. Without that, teams risk fragmentation between old and new tracing stacks, which complicates debugging, support, and long-term maintainability.

AWS X-Ray is transitioning to OpenTelemetry as its primary instrumentation standard for application tracing. OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation solutions are recommended for producing traces from applications and sending them to AWS X-Ray. X-Rayโ€™s existing console experience and functionality continuous to be fully supported and remains unchanged by this transition. OpenTelemetry is the industry-wide open-source standard for tracing instrumentation and observability, providing IT teams with standardized protocols and tools for collecting and routing telemetry data. It delivers a unified format for instrumenting, generating, gathering, and exporting application telemetry data, such as metrics, logs, and traces to monitoring platforms for analysis and insights. This means faster feature development and a broader set of tools and integrations that are consistent across the industry. OpenTelemetry Instrumentation solutions provide broader support for framework and library instrumentation, more language support, and zero-code instrumentation capabilities. The AWS X-Ray SDKs and Daemon set are transitioning to maintenance mode. During this phase, AWS will limit SDK and Daemon releases to address security issues only. The SDKs/Daemon will not receive new feature enhancements. 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. Transaction Search offers a new cost effective pricing with all of X-Ray capabilities bundled along with Application Performance Monitoring or Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals feature set. New feature development will focus on OpenTelemetry-based solutions, while existing functionality will continue to work as expected. For instance, the SDKs will not receive additional Library Instrumentations or enhancements to existing Library Instrumentations. The following table outlines the level of support for each phase of the X-Ray SDKs and Daemon lifecycle.
SDK Lifecycle Phase Start Date End Date Support Level
General Availability N/A February 25, 2026 During this phase, the SDKs and Daemon are fully supported. AWS will provide regular SDK/Daemon releases that include bug and security fixes.
Maintenance mode February 25, 2026 N/A AWS will limit SDK and Daemon releases to address security issues only. The SDKs/Daemon will not receive new feature enhancements.
To help with the migration, you can find migration guidance and examples in the AWS X-Ray Documentation. When you migrate to AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) or native OpenTelemetry with Amazon CloudWatch, you will gain access to powerful tools such as CloudWatch Application Signalsย for enhanced application health monitoring, andย Transaction Searchย for complete visibility into your applicationโ€™s transaction spans. To learn more about OpenTelemetry as well as leveraging more software solutions from AWS CloudWatch that utilizes OpenTelemetry, refer to the following resources:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/aws-x-ray-sdks-daemon-migration-to-opentelemetry/

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