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Customizing OpenTelemetry .NET SDK

This doc is work-in-progress.

TracerProvider

As shown in the getting-started doc, a valid TracerProvider must be configured and built to collect traces with OpenTelemetry .NET Sdk. TracerProvider holds all the configuration for tracing like samplers, processors, etc. Naturally, almost all the customizations must be done on the TracerProvider.

Building a TracerProvider

Building a TracerProvider is done using TracerProviderBuilder which must be obtained by calling Sdk.CreateTracerProviderBuilder(). TracerProviderBuilder exposes various methods which configures the provider it is going to build. These includes methods like SetSampler, AddProcessor etc, and are explained in subsequent sections of this document. Once configuration is done, calling Build() on the TracerProviderBuilder builds the TracerProvider instance. Once built, changes to its configuration is not allowed, with the exception of adding more processors. In most cases, a single TracerProvider is created at the application startup, and is disposed when application shuts down.

The snippet below shows how to build a basic TracerProvider. This will create a provider with default configuration, and is not particularly useful. The subsequent sections shows how to build a more useful provider.

using OpenTelemetry;
using OpenTelemetry.Trace;

using var tracerProvider = Sdk.CreateTracerProviderBuilder().Build();

In a typical application, a single TracerProvider is created at application startup and disposed at application shutdown. It is important to ensure that the provider is not disposed too early. Actual mechanism depends on the application type. For example, in a typical ASP.NET application, TracerProvider is created in Application_Start, and disposed in Application_End (both methods part of Global.asax.cs file) as shown here. In a typical ASP.NET Core application, TracerProvider lifetime is managed by leveraging the built-in Dependency Injection container as shown here.

TracerProvider configuration

TracerProvider holds the tracing configuration, which includes the following:

  1. The list of ActivitySources (aka Tracers) from which traces are collected.
  2. The list of instrumentations enabled via InstrumentationLibrary.
  3. The list of Processors, including exporting processors which exports traces to Exporters
  4. The Resource associated with the traces.
  5. The Sampler to be used.

Activity Source

ActivitySource denotes a Tracer, which is used to start activities. The SDK follows an explicit opt-in model for listening to activity sources. i.e, by default, it listens to no sources. Every activity source which produce telemetry must be explicitly added to the tracer provider to start collecting traces from them.

AddSource method on TracerProviderBuilder can be used to add a ActivitySource to the provider. The name of the ActivitySource (case-insensitive) must be the argument to this method. Multiple AddSource can be called to add more than one source. It also supports wild-card subscription model as well.

It is not possible to add sources after the provider is built, by calling the Build() method on the TracerProviderBuilder.

The snippet below shows how to add activity sources to the provider.

using OpenTelemetry;
using OpenTelemetry.Trace;

using var tracerProvider = Sdk.CreateTracerProviderBuilder()
    // The following subscribes to activities from Activity Source
    // named "MyCompany.MyProduct.MyLibrary" only.
    .AddSource("MyCompany.MyProduct.MyLibrary")
    // The following subscribes to activities from all Activity Sources
    // whose name starts with  "AbcCompany.XyzProduct.".
    .AddSource("AbcCompany.XyzProduct.*")
    .Build();

See Program.cs for complete example.

Note A common mistake while configuring TracerProvider is forgetting to add all ActivitySources to the provider. It is recommended to leverage the wild card subscription model where it makes sense. For example, if your application is expecting to enable tracing from a number of libraries from a company "Abc", the you can use AddSource("Abc.*") to enable all sources whose name starts with "Abc.".

Instrumentation

// TODO

Processor

// TODO

Resource

// TODO

Sampler

// TODO

Context Propagation

// TODO: OpenTelemetry Sdk contents about Context. // TODO: Links to built-in instrumentations doing Propagation.