AWS CloudWatch Omni now generally available with 17 built-in evaluators

For years, observability tools answered a simple question: is it running? Agentic AI breaks that model. An agent can return a clean response and meet its latency target while still giving a customer the wrong answer or pulling from a stale knowledge base. AWS built Omni around that gap, moving observability outside the AWS Management Console, supporting OpenTelemetry and embedding AI so teams can start from a single trace and jump straight to evaluation.

The platform arrives in a crowded field. Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, Grafana Labs and Splunk are all expanding into agent observability, as are LangSmith and Arize AI. Omni's differentiator is its unified data layer: agent traces, application telemetry and infrastructure signals share the same CloudWatch data store, and AWS DevOps Agent is enabled by default in investigation sessions, correlating signals and keeping an investigation history that regulated industries may treat as audit evidence.

Openness helps, but lock-in isn't fully eliminated. OpenTelemetry makes data portable, yet the intelligence layer — topology, evaluators, investigation history and DevOps Agent — runs on AWS. Companies already invested heavily in AWS will likely default to Omni, while multicloud shops with mature Datadog or Splunk estates may use it for development and evaluation and integrate rather than replace. The outcome hinges on whether buyers treat evaluation as an operational discipline rather than a feature to switch on.