I have been trying to integrate OTel into my Lambdas for a week now. Integrating it in code was no problem, but actually sending the traces and metrics to a Backend of our choice is quite hard. I have initially tried ADOT Collector from AWS, but it was quite slow and didn’t work as expected for some reason, I then configured the original OTel Collector and it was faster, but I just couldn’t get it to send data to Datadog, and then I found out that the Collector Layer used for lambdas is a smaller version of the standard non-layer Collector, and it does not have the Datadog exporter in it. Then, I have tried using the vendor specific Datadog Extension for Lambda (risky move, because it’s Datadog specific, I know) and it claimed to be fully OTel compliant, but it just refuses to send traces made by OTel in the Lambdas. It only sends traces made by the, again, vendor specific Datadog Tracing library, and it’s a higher risk of vendor locking. So far my experience with OTel in lambdas was not so great. This Datadog Exporter is taking even about 1s to start, so it impacts a lot the cold starts and high-load, because of the amount of things it does after it collects the traces.