Book Image

Modern Distributed Tracing in .NET

By : Liudmila Molkova
Book Image

Modern Distributed Tracing in .NET

By: Liudmila Molkova

Overview of this book

As distributed systems become more complex and dynamic, their observability needs to grow to aid the development of holistic solutions for performance or usage analysis and debugging. Distributed tracing brings structure, correlation, causation, and consistency to your telemetry, thus allowing you to answer arbitrary questions about your system and creating a foundation for observability vendors to build visualizations and analytics. Modern Distributed Tracing in .NET is your comprehensive guide to observability that focuses on tracing and performance analysis using a combination of telemetry signals and diagnostic tools. You'll begin by learning how to instrument your apps automatically as well as manually in a vendor-neutral way. Next, you’ll explore how to produce useful traces and metrics for typical cloud patterns and get insights into your system and investigate functional, configurational, and performance issues. The book is filled with instrumentation examples that help you grasp how to enrich auto-generated telemetry or produce your own to get the level of detail your system needs, along with controlling your costs with sampling, aggregation, and verbosity. By the end of this book, you'll be ready to adopt and leverage tracing and other observability signals and tools and tailor them to your needs as your system evolves.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Part 1: Introducing Distributed Tracing
6
Part 2: Instrumenting .NET Applications
11
Part 3: Observability for Common Cloud Scenarios
16
Part 4: Implementing Distributed Tracing in Your Organization

Enabling auto-collection with OpenTelemetry

In this section, we’re going to add OpenTelemetry to our demo application and enable auto-collection for ASP.NET Core, HttpClient, Entity Framework, and runtime metrics. We’ll see what it adds to the bare-bones monitoring experience.

We’ll export traces to Jaeger and metrics to Prometheus, as shown in Figure 2.7:

Figure 2.7 – Meme services sending telemetry to Jaeger and Prometheus

Figure 2.7 – Meme services sending telemetry to Jaeger and Prometheus

You can also send data directly to your observability backend if it has an OTLP endpoint, or you can configure a backend-specific exporter in the application. So, let’s get started and instrument our application with OpenTelemetry.

Installing and configuring OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry comes as a set of NuGet packages. Here are a few that we’re using in our demo app:

  • OpenTelemetry: The SDK that contains all that we need to produce traces and metrics and configure a generic...