Aspire Dashboard - Persist dashboard data

[sharpSteff]

Currently the telemetry data is hold in a cycular buffer in memory.
It would be great to have the option to persist the data.

[drewnoakes]

@sharpSteff can you elaborate a little more on the scenario here? Are you focussed on the local dev loop, or a hosted dashboard? What about data that's missed while the dashboard is offline/restarting?

[Drsela]

@drewnoakes I would like to elaborate on this feature request, as it would be very beneficial for my use case.

Using the Standalone Aspire Dashboard, and having multiple microservices use OTEL to send data to this dashboard is vital for log aggregation and metrics.

However, server maintenance often requires patching and rebooting, which results in the loss of all data stored in memory by the Standalone Aspire Dashboard as mentioned here. This can be problematic for production scenarios.

This feature would help prevent the loss of log files during such reboots. While I don't expect the Standalone Aspire Dashboard to retain logs indefinitely, a grace period of 30-90 days would suffice for most production scenarios.
This feature would also prevent data loss when updating the Docker image, since that requires the container to be restarted.

I wrote to @davidfowl on LinkedIn and he mentioned that there are currently no short-term plans for long-term storage ;-)

[davidfowl]

I think this is the most reasonable reason to support for optionally persist telemetry, reboots. That said, we do not want to build a data storage model optimized for querying logs, metrics and traces. My thought is that we would support a best effort flushing telemetry to disk on graceful shutdown (or on some interval) to handle the survival of reboots/upgrades. This isn't a scalable persistent store optimized for queries (this is where real APM systems excel).

To be clear on the intent here:

• This dashboard should be considered a "live view" of telemetry with a fixed buffer size (configurable).
• There's no plan to build a scalable backend storage or pluggable storage engine for the dashboard.
• If you have a large-scale system sending lots of telemetry to the dashboard likely won't work very well (large cluster with thousands of services sending telemetry). This is why most large scale APM systems separate collection and analytics.
• This would not be pluggable storage, we write to disk. I'd like to avoid anything complex an extensible. You can mount a volume or copy that data blob if you need it to go elsewhere.

[sharpSteff]

@Drsela sums it up quite nicely.
Aspire Dashboard is sufficient for my otlp usecase. I like to see the last couple of months of data and don't want to cry when my host has to restart.
I do not need separated otlp-collector and db to ensure every bit of data. I use it more like to show trends.

[davidfowl]

I do not need separated otlp-collector and db to ensure every bit of data. I use it more like to show trends.

How are you going to get trends with the dashboard? We're not adding those features.

[sharpSteff]

I do not need separated otlp-collector and db to ensure every bit of data. I use it more like to show trends.

How are you going to get trends with the dashboard? We're not adding those features.

I added myself a custom sub-page presenting the data

[mitchdenny]

Are you running a fork of the dashboard?

[Drsela]

My thought is that we would support a best effort flushing telemetry to disk on graceful shutdown (or on some interval) to handle the survival of reboots/upgrades

This would be sufficient for our use case :-)
Right now we're using a self-developed dashboard that are reading NLog (rolling windows + 7 days) files and visualises them.
We also use Application Insights for 'true' APM .

Replacing our own dashboard with standalone Aspire would be awesome. And flusning the telemetry to disk on graceful shutdown would be a great way for us to migrate to standalone Aspire.