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Getting Started with OpenTelemetry .NET in 5 Minutes

First, download and install the .NET Core SDK on your computer.

Create a new console application and run it:

dotnet new console --output getting-started
cd getting-started
dotnet run

You should see the following output:

Hello World!

Install the OpenTelemetry.Exporter.Console package:

dotnet add package OpenTelemetry.Exporter.Console -v 1.0.0-rc1.1

Update the Program.cs file with the code from Program.cs:

Run the application again (using dotnet run) and you should see the trace output from the console.

Activity.Id:          00-8389584945550f40820b96ce1ceb9299-745239d26e408342-01
Activity.DisplayName: SayHello
Activity.Kind:        Internal
Activity.StartTime:   2020-08-12T15:59:10.4461835Z
Activity.Duration:    00:00:00.0066039
Activity.TagObjects:
    foo: 1
    bar: Hello, World!
    baz: [1, 2, 3]

Congratulations! You are now collecting traces using OpenTelemetry.

What does the above program do?

The program creates an ActivitySource which represents an OpenTelemetry Tracer. The ActivitySource instance is used to start an Activity which represents an OpenTelemetry Span. An OpenTelemetry TracerProvider is configured to subscribe to the activities from the source MyCompany.MyProduct.MyLibrary, and export it to ConsoleExporter. ConsoleExporter simply displays it on the console.

OpenTelemetry .NET and relation with .NET Activity API

If you tried the above program, you may have already noticed that the terms ActivitySource and Activity were used instead of Tracer and Span from OpenTelemetry specification. This results from the fact that, OpenTelemetry .NET is a somewhat unique implementation of the OpenTelemetry project, as parts of the tracing API are incorporated directly into the .NET runtime itself. From a high level, what this means is that the Activity and ActivitySource classes from .NET runtime represent the OpenTelemetry concepts of Span and Tracer respectively. Read this to learn more.