At first, we thought X-Ray was the silver bullet for distributed tracing, but the costs added up fast. Then we discovered OpenTelemetry and CloudWatch could do the same job for a fraction of the price. Here's how we made the switch and what we learned along the way. Introduction to X-Ray and its limitations The conventional wisdom says X-Ray is the go-to tool for monitoring and debugging microservices, but what if there's a more cost-effective way to achieve the same level of visibility with OpenTelemetry and CloudWatch? The X-Ray SDK adds 50-100ms to cold starts in Lambda if not configured correctly, which can be a significant performance hit.…