CloudWatch pipelines now tidies up your OpenTelemetry metrics as they arrive!
Hey everyone, it's me, Shii-chan! Today I found a handy little monitoring update to share.
AWS What's New
aws.amazon.com
What was announced?
Over on AWS's What's New, they announced that Amazon CloudWatch pipelines now supports processing and enriching OpenTelemetry (OTel) metrics. You can transform metrics right in the ingestion path, with no extra infrastructure and no application code changes.
The story so far
Until now, if you wanted to add context to your OTel metrics or tidy them up, you had to build your own processing layer or modify the source instrumentation directly. A bit of a hassle, right?
What changes
From now on the transformation happens on the ingestion path itself, so without standing up new infrastructure you can:
- Add business context like team ownership, cost centers, and environment tags through enrichment
- Strip high-cardinality labels to cut storage costs
- Rename metrics and attributes for naming consistency
The best part is that it all happens transparently, without touching your instrumentation.
Dive Deep
Getting started is easy: open the Amazon CloudWatch console, go to pipelines under Ingestion, and pick CloudWatch Metrics (OTel) as the source. The processing itself is free, and you only pay standard CloudWatch OTel metric ingestion pricing (see CloudWatch Pricing for details).
It's available in Regions where CloudWatch pipelines and native OpenTelemetry metrics are supported. If you want to dig deeper, check the CloudWatch pipelines documentation.
Wrap-up
- CloudWatch pipelines now supports processing and enriching OTel metrics
- You can transform metrics during ingestion with no new infrastructure or code changes
- Tagging, label reduction, and renaming let you add context and cut costs
- Processing is free; you only pay the standard ingestion price
If you collect metrics with OTel and struggle with cleanup or cost optimization later, this update is for you, monitoring and SRE folks!
