Collecting telemetry from minidumps

[ptodev]

Request

There was a recent discussion about a need to analyse minidumps and create telemetry such as logs or metrics based on the information inside them. Minidumps can include various information and they vary based on the programming language (C++, Java, etc...) and the operating system (Windows, Linux, etc...).

It is not yet certain whether the Agent should support such a need and to what extent. I am opening this issue so that we can keep track of such requests and gauge interest.

It would also be interesting to see if the OpenTelemetry Collector would like to have such a component. We could potentially upstream it and it could be OTel native. In the future OTel will support "profiling" signals, and it will be interesting to see how stack traces will be represented - this could impact how a component which analyses minidumps is designed.

An interesting semi-related reading might be this article about how Windows minidumps are managed by Microsoft.

Use case

Sometimes applications create lots of minidumps, and being able to gain insight into them at scale could be useful. Opening a dump and looking at each one manually can be time consuming.

[github-actions]

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