Skip to main content

Application Insights–OpenTelemetry integration for ASP.NET Core

OpenTelemetry is becoming THE standard of telemetry instrumentation. And thanks to the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Exporter we can keep using Application Insights as our tool of choice. In this post I'll walk you through the steps to link your OpenTelemetry enabled ASP.NET core application to Azure Monitor Application Insights.

Important to mention is that this feature is still in preview!

At the moment of writing distributed tracing and metrics are supported but some of the other features that we like from the Application Insights SDK are not available(yet).

What is not supported?

I copied the list from the documentation:

Add Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Exporter to your ASP.NET Core application

Now that we now what isn’t available yet, let’s focus on what we can do and see how we can start instrumenting our ASP.NET Core application using OpenTelemetry.

Let’s start by adding the necessary Nuget packages:

dotnet add package --prerelease Azure.Monitor.OpenTelemetry.Exporter

We also add some extra packages to include extra instrumentation specific for ASP.NET Core:

dotnet add package --prerelease OpenTelemetry.Extensions.Hosting
dotnet add package --prerelease OpenTelemetry.Instrumentation.AspNetCore
dotnet add package --prerelease OpenTelemetry.Instrumentation.Http
dotnet add package --prerelease OpenTelemetry.Instrumentation.SqlClient

Now that we have all the packages we need, we can add the necessary instrumentation code:

We specified a servicename and version and added some extra attributes. But let’s take advantage of the extra instrumentation libraries we added and extend the configuration a little bit:

Last thing we need to add is the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry exporter itself. Here we need to specify our Applications Insights connection string:

If we now run our application, our instrumentation data should be send to Application Insights.

More information: Enable Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry for .NET, Node.js, and Python applications - Azure Monitor | Microsoft Learn

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

XUnit - Assert.Collection

A colleague asked me to take a look at the following code inside a test project: My first guess would be that this code checks that the specified condition(the contains) is true for every element in the list.  This turns out not to be the case. The Assert.Collection expects a list of element inspectors, one for every item in the list. The first inspector is used to check the first item, the second inspector the second item and so on. The number of inspectors should match the number of elements in the list. An example: The behavior I expected could be achieved using the Assert.All method:
Read more

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

Angular --deploy-url and --base-href

As long you are running your Angular application at a root URL (e.g. www.myangularapp.com ) you don’t need to worry that much about either the ‘--deploy-url’ and ‘--base-href’ parameters. But once you want to serve your Angular application from a server sub folder(e.g. www.mywebsite.com/angularapp ) these parameters become important. --base-href If you deploy your Angular app to a subfolder, the ‘--base-href’ is important to generate the correct routes. This parameter will update the <base href> tag inside the index.html. For example, if the index.html is on the server at /angularapp/index.html , the base href should be set to <base href="/angularapp/"> . More information: https://angular.io/guide/deployment --deploy-url A second parameter that is important is ‘--deploy-url’. This parameter will update the generated url’s for our assets(scripts, css) inside the index.html. To make your assets available at /angularapp/, the deploy url should
Read more