ASP.NET Core Distributed Tracing with OpenTelemetry
In modern microservice architectures, a single user request can trigger a cascade of calls across numerous services. When something goes wrong, pinpointing the source of failure or a performance bottleneck becomes a significant challenge. This is where distributed tracing comes in, and OpenTelemetry has emerged as the industry standard for implementing it.
This post will guide you through integrating OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing into your ASP.NET Core applications. We’ll cover the core concepts, set up a basic project, and visualize traces in a backend like Jaeger.
What is Distributed Tracing?
Distributed tracing allows you to follow a single request’s journey from start to finish as it moves through different services. It stitches together individual operations into a unified view, helping you understand the flow, identify latency issues, and debug errors effectively.
Key concepts include:
- Trace: Represents the entire end-to-end path of a request. A trace is a collection of spans.
- Span: Represents a single unit of work or operation within a trace, like an HTTP call or a database query. Each span has a start time, duration, and associated metadata (tags).
- Trace Context: A set of unique identifiers (like a
TraceIdandSpanId) that are passed between services with each request. This context is what allows the system to link all related spans into a single trace.
Think of it like tracking a package. The trace is the entire journey from the warehouse to …
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