Introduction to OpenTelemetry for .NET Developers

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is the CNCF standard for observability. It unifies Tracing, Metrics, and Logging.

The Collector

Your app sends data to an OTel Collector (via OTLP protocol), and the collector exports it to Jaeger, Prometheus, Zipkin, or New Relic. This avoids vendor lock-in.

services.AddOpenTelemetryTracing(b => b
    .AddSource("MyApp")
    .AddAspNetCoreInstrumentation()
    .AddOtlpExporter());