Introducing OpenTelemetry

Telemetry is a combination of emitting logs and metrics from your code and then monitoring and analyzing the results. Unlike debugging, telemetry should not affect the operation and should have minimal impact on performance.

Logs are used to record a discreet operation and its success or failure. Metrics are used to record numbers, for example, completed requests, active requests, exceptions thrown, and so on.

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an observability framework. It combines an API, an SDK, and tools that work together to generate and collect your solution’s telemetry data such as metrics and logs.

Since .NET provides its own logging API, you do not need to learn the OTel API. Instead, OTel integrates with ILogger. OTel requires the .NET 6 SDK or later.

The key benefits of using OTel with .NET projects are a common collection mechanism, common schemas and semantics for telemetry data, and an API for how third-party systems for analyzing...