AWS EMF Exporter

Export OpenTelemetry metrics to Cloudwatch Logs in EMF format.

Telemetry Type	Support
Metrics	✅

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The AWS EMF exporter can be selected by passing --exporter awsemf. The AWS EMF exporter only supports metrics. The AWS EMF exporter will convert metrics into the AWS Cloudwatch Embedded metric format and send those as JSON log lines to Cloudwatch. Cloudwatch will convert the log lines into Cloudwatch Metrics.

See the AWS Auth page for instructions on how to retrieve credentials necessary for exporting to Cloudwatch.

Option	Default	Options
--awsemf-exporter-region	us-east-1	aws region codes
--awsemf-exporter-custom-endpoint
--awsemf-exporter-log-group-name	/metrics/default
--awsemf-exporter-log-stream-name	otel-stream
--awsemf-exporter-log-retention	0
--awsemf-exporter-namespace
--awsemf-exporter-retain-initial-value-of-delta-metric	false
--awsemf-exporter-include-dimensions
--awsemf-exporter-exclude-dimensions

Dimension Filtering

By default all resource and metric data point attributes will be included as dimensions in the Cloudwatch Metric. You can use the include-dimensions and exclude-dimensions options to selectively filter which dimensions are included in the generated metric. This can be useful to include a high-cardinality dimension in the log output, but not set it on the metric. The Cloudwatch Metric will represent the aggregation across all values without incurring the cost of the excessive high-cardinality. In the scenario that you want to examine the data based on the high-cardinality dimension, you can use Logs Insights to query that dimension from the logs.

Both include-dimensions and exclude-dimensions take comma-separated wildcard patterns to match against the attribute names from the metrics. The * character can be used to match zero-or-more characters. Matching is case insensitive. By default all dimensions are included (include-dimensions=*), but you can also selectively filter which to include. The exclude-dimensions takes precedence, so any dimension that matches an exclude pattern will be excluded.

Example

• --awsemf-exporter-include-dimensions service.*,http.*
• --awsemf-exporter-exclude-dimensions *.internal

With these options, here's how the following attributes would be handled:

• service.name: included
• http.method: included
• http.internal: excluded
• telemetry.sdk.language: excluded

Notes

• If the log stream or log group do not exist, the exporter will attempt to create them automatically. Make sure that the credentials have the right IAM permissions.
• If --awsemf-exporter-retain-initial-value-of-delta-metric is true, then the initial value of a delta metric is retained when calculating deltas.
• If the namespace is not specified, Rotel will look for service.namespace and service.name in the resource attributes and use those. If those don't exist, it will fall back to a namespace of default.
• Log retention is specified in days, with zero meaning never expire. Valid values are: 1, 3, 5, 7, 14, 30, 60, 90, 120, 150, 180, 365, 400, 545, 731, 1827, 2192, 2557, 2922, 3288, or 3653.