...You must also add either the Oj or JrJackson gems, for MRI and JRuby respectively, for JSON parsing. The default JSON parser will not work properly, currently. The SDKs included with X-Ray are part of a tightly integrated instrumentation solution offered by AWS. The AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry is part of a broader industry solution in which X-Ray is only one of many tracing solutions. You can implement end-to-end tracing in X-Ray using either approach, but it’s important to understand the differences in order to determine the most useful approach for you.