New Relic AWS Metric Streams Integration Now Supports OpenTelemetry 1.0 Format

We are excited to announce a significant enhancement to our AWS infrastructure monitoring capabilities. Our AWS CloudWatch Metric Streams integration now supports the OpenTelemetry (OTEL) 1.0 output format. This update allows you to leverage the latest industry standards for telemetry data, providing a more efficient and future-proof way to stream metrics from your AWS environment into New Relic.

What's Changed

You can now configure your AWS Metric Stream integration to send data using the OTEL 1.0 format, which uses an efficient binary protobuf encoding. To ensure backward compatibility and a seamless transition for existing users, our updated CloudFormation and Terraform integrations will continue to default to the OTEL 0.7 format. You can easily change the default to use the new 1.0 format.

This enhancement provides several key benefits:

• Improved Performance and Efficiency: Utilize the highly efficient binary protobuf format of OTEL 1.0, reducing data transfer volume and processing overhead compared to JSON-based formats.
• Richer Metadata and Future-Proofing: Align with the latest OpenTelemetry standards, ensuring compatibility with future enhancements and enabling richer, more detailed metric attributes.

How to Enable OpenTelemetry 1.0

You can enable the OTEL 1.0 format based on your integration method.

CloudFormation Template

For New Stacks

When setting up a new stack with our latest template, you will have the option to select opentelemetry1.0 as the output format. The template continues to default to opentelemetry0.7.

For Existing Stacks

If you have an existing stack, you must perform a stack update.

1. Navigate to your stack in the AWS CloudFormation console.
2. Initiate an update and choose Replace existing template.
3. Provide the following updated template URL: https://nr-downloads-main.s3.amazonaws.com/cloud_integrations/aws/cloudformation/newrelic-cloudformation-mstreams.yml
4. Proceed with the stack update, selecting opentelemetry1.0 when prompted for the output format.

Terraform

Note: Support for the OTEL 1.0 format is available starting with version 3.70.6 of the New Relic Terraform provider.

Our Terraform configuration uses the official newrelic provider to create the necessary AWS and New Relic resources. To enable OTEL 1.0, you define a variable for the output format and set its value to opentelemetry1.0.

First, define the variable in your variables.tf file, defaulting to opentelemetry0.7 for backward compatibility:

variable "output_format" {
  description = "The output format for the CloudWatch Metric Stream. Use 'opentelemetry0.7' for OTEL 0.7 or 'opentelemetry1.0' for OTEL 1.0."
  type        = string
  default     = "opentelemetry0.7"
}

Then, in your main.tf, reference this variable in the aws_cloudwatch_metric_stream resource:

resource "aws_cloudwatch_metric_stream" "newrelic_metric_stream" {
  # ... other properties like name, role_arn, firehose_arn ...

  output_format = var.output_format

  # ... include/exclude filters ...
}

When you run your Terraform plan, you can set output_format to opentelemetry1.0 to enable the new format.

Manual setup

If you configured your integration manually, you can update the format directly in the AWS console.

1. Navigate to CloudWatch > Metrics > Streams.
2. Select the metric stream that forwards data to New Relic's Kinesis Firehose.
3. Click Edit.
4. Under Output format, change the selection to OpenTelemetry 1.0.
5. Click Save.