Amazon CloudWatch Preview Adds OpenTelemetry Metrics for Amazon EKS

CloudWatch introduced Container Insights with OpenTelemetry metrics to enhance visibility into Amazon EKS cluster health and performance.

By Daniel Brooks · Editorial pseudonym · 2026-04-02 · 1 min read

AI-ASSISTED REPORTING · RETROSPECTIVE ARCHIVE

Retrospective edition: 2026-04-02. Source published: 2026-04-02. Added to this archive: 2026-11-03. This briefing was prepared later from the linked announcement; it was not published on this website on the historical edition date.

Building on existing Container Insights, this preview collects metrics via open source and AWS collectors, sent using OpenTelemetry Protocol with up to 150 enriched labels including Kubernetes metadata and custom tags. Dashboards enable detailed views by cluster, node, and pod dimensions.

Users can query metrics with PromQL in CloudWatch Query Studio and detect anomalies automatically. The CloudWatch Observability EKS add-on simplifies installation and detects specialized hardware accelerators, supporting simultaneous publishing of OpenTelemetry and traditional Container Insights metrics in select regions during preview.

Source & further reading

Amazon CloudWatch launches OTel Container Insights for Amazon EKS (Preview) ↗

Source published 2026-04-02. This report was prepared with AI assistance from the linked primary-source material. Claims and limitations should be checked against the original announcement or research.