Signals in the Noise: Observability Insights Series

Episode 1: How AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI Support APM and OpenTelemetry

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Introduction

Modern applications are increasingly distributed across multi-cloud and hybrid environments, making observability a critical enabler for reliability, performance, and customer experience. Cloud providers are increasingly partnering to offer services across the clouds.

All four major cloud providers --- Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) --- offer native Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools. But what stands out is their growing adoption of OpenTelemetry (OTel), the open-source standard for telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces).

This post explores how each cloud balances native APM capabilities with OpenTelemetry support, and what that means for multi-cloud observability strategies.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS)

APM Tools:

AWS's primary APM service is AWS X-Ray, which provides distributed tracing for applications and services. It integrates with Amazon CloudWatch for metrics and logging, allowing for a combined view of application health.

OpenTelemetry Support:

AWS has been a strong proponent of OpenTelemetry. It provides the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT), a distribution of the OpenTelemetry SDKs and Collector. ADOT makes it easy to automatically instrument applications and send telemetry data (traces and metrics) to AWS's native services (X-Ray, CloudWatch) or to third-party tools. This approach reduces manual effort and simplifies multi-cloud monitoring.

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Microsoft Azure

APM Tools:

Azure's main APM tool is Azure Monitor Application Insights. It provides deep application-level insights into performance, dependencies, and exceptions. It is part of the larger Azure Monitor suite, which handles logs, metrics, and alerts.

OpenTelemetry Support:

Azure has integrated OpenTelemetry into its native tools. The Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro is a Microsoft-supported version of the OpenTelemetry SDKs that simplifies the process of collecting telemetry data. Azure OpenTelemetry offerings are available for .NET, Node.js, Python, and Java applications. This allows developers to use OpenTelemetry to instrument their applications and send the data directly to Application Insights. Azure also offers a pipeline for high-scale data ingestion using the OpenTelemetry Collector, which is particularly useful for multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

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Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

APM Tools:

GCP's APM is part of the Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver). It includes Cloud Trace for distributed tracing, Cloud Monitoring for metrics, and Cloud Logging for logs. These tools are tightly integrated to provide a unified observability experience.

OpenTelemetry Support:

GCP is a founding member of the OpenTelemetry project and is deeply committed to the open standard. Its native tools, such as Cloud Trace and Cloud Monitoring, have built-in support for ingesting data directly from OpenTelemetry. It also provides OpenTelemetry exporters that can be used to send data from the OpenTelemetry Collector to GCP's backend services.

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Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)

APM Tools:

OCI offers OCI Application Performance Monitoring (APM), which provides full-stack visibility, distributed tracing, and real user monitoring. It works in conjunction with other OCI services like OCI Logging and OCI Monitoring.

OpenTelemetry Support:

OCI is highly interoperable with OpenTelemetry. Its APM service can ingest OpenTelemetry (OTLP) spans and metrics directly from the OpenTelemetry Collector. OCI also provides enhanced APM agents for specific languages like Java and .NET that offer deeper diagnostics beyond what standard OpenTelemetry agents provide, giving customers the flexibility to choose between open standards and proprietary solutions for enhanced features.

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📊 Comparative Snapshot

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Key Takeaways

• All four cloud providers support OpenTelemetry, signaling an industry-wide shift toward vendor-neutral observability.

• AWS & GCP are the strongest advocates, offering robust native OTel pipelines.

• Azure balances native monitoring with hybrid/multi-cloud flexibility.

• OCI provides a hybrid model: standards compliance + proprietary depth.

For organizations running workloads across multiple providers, OpenTelemetry is quickly becoming the lingua franca of observability --- and understanding how each cloud integrates with it will shape your monitoring strategy.

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Next in the Series

In the next post of Signals in the Noise: Observability Insights Series, I'll explore how OpenTelemetry Collectors can be configured in OCI for unified observability.