Chapter 3 – The .NET Observability Ecosystem

1. Check the registry (https://opentelemetry.io/registry/) and OpenTelemetry .NET repo. If you don’t see your library in any of them, search in issues and PRs. It’s also a good idea to search whether anything is available in the library GitHub repo or documentation.

When you find an instrumentation, there are several things to check for:

• Version and stability: Beta instrumentations could still have a high quality and be battle-tested but do not guarantee API or telemetry stability
• Performance and thread safety: Understanding the mechanism behind instrumentation is important to identify possible limitations and issues in advance

2. The most common way to instrument libraries and frameworks is ActivitySource— it’s the .NET analog of OpenTelemetry Tracer, which can start activities. You can configure OpenTelemetry to listen to a source by its name. You might also see instrumentations...