Open telemetry 101

Overiew#

What is OpenTelemetry

Key areas#

• Spans: Uniquely identify a request with a start and end time, that may also have parent.

  In .Net world usually using Activity type to represent a Span, which mean the terms are inter-changeable

• Events: Simple text based element that's added to a trace to denote that something happen in some specific point in time (example: a cache missing)
• Attributes: Collection of name-value pairs that we can record as a part of a span (example: Http status code)

  In .Net world, they called Tags, cause Attributes refered to something difference already

• Baggages: Collection of name-value pairs, but travel across the process boundaries whereas Attributes do not (example: a userId that should travel all the way through the system)

Local dev setup#

docker run -d --name jaeger-dev -p 5775:5775/udp -p 6831:6831/udp -p 6832:6832/udp -p 5778:5778 -p 16686:16686 -p 14268:14268 -p 14250:14250 -p 9411:9411 jaegertracing/all-in-one:1.28

• Config the service to export data to localhost:6831.
• Run the app a few time to generate traffic.
• Go to localhost:16686 for UI serving.

Further investigation document#

Deep Dive into Open Telemetry for .NET should be a good start!