opentelemetry-proto VS opentelemetry-dotnet

Maybe, you are asking yourself: "But I already had instrumented my applications with vendor-specific libraries and I'm using their agents and monitoring tools, why should I change to OpenTelemetry?". The answer is: maybe you're right and I don't want to encourage you to update the way how you are doing observability in your applications, that's a hard and complex task. But, if you are starting from scratch or you are not happy with your current observability infrastructure, OpenTelemetry is the best choice, independently of the backend telemetry tool that you are using. I would like to invite you to take a look at the number of exporters available in the collector contrib section, if your backend tracing tool is not there, probably it's already using the Open Telemetry Protocol (OTLP) and you will be able to use the core collector. Otherwise, you should consider changing your backend telemetry tool or contributing to the project creating a new exporter.

Here's the example payloads for OTLP over JSON and example of how to ingest them: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-proto/tree/m...

An OTLP receiver can receive data via gRPC or HTTP using the OTLP format. There are advanced configurations that you can enable via the YAML file.

Cerbos fully transitioned from OpenCensus to OpenTelemetry, a move that significantly boosts our metrics and tracing capabilities. This shift allows for more efficient integration with a variety of observability products supporting the OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP) but also offers the flexibility to use push metrics and fine-tune trace sampling. With this update, configuration through the tracing block in Cerbos files is deprecated in favor of using OpenTelemetry environment variables.

Networking is Easy (Really!) Since you install the agent directly into the environment where you are running your application, there is no complex networking. When developing in localMode, the agent listens on the common OpenTelemetry Line Protocol (OTLP) on ports 4317 & 4318 automatically.

Oh nice, thank you (and also solumos) for the links! It looks like oteps/pull/171 (merged June 2023) expanded and superseded the opentelemetry-proto/pull/346 PR (closed Jul 2022) [0]. The former resulted in merging OpenTelemetry Enhancement Proposal 156 [1], with some interesting results especially for 'Phase 2' where they implemented columnar storage end-to-end (see the Validation section [2]):

* For univariate time series, OTel Arrow is 2 to 2.5 better in terms of bandwidth reduction ... and the end-to-end speed is 3.1 to 11.2 times faster

* For multivariate time series, OTel Arrow is 3 to 7 times better in terms of bandwidth reduction ... Phase 2 has [not yet] been .. estimated but similar results are expected.

* For logs, OTel Arrow is 1.6 to 2 times better in terms of bandwidth reduction ... and the end-to-end speed is 2.3 to 4.86 times faster

* For traces, OTel Arrow is 1.7 to 2.8 times better in terms of bandwidth reduction ... and the end-to-end speed is 3.37 to 6.16 times faster

[0]: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-proto/pull/3...

[1]: https://github.com/open-telemetry/oteps/blob/main/text/0156-...

[2]: https://github.com/open-telemetry/oteps/blob/main/text/0156-...

We then modified the benchmark to encode our example data which is an opentelemetry trace data.

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-dotnet: The OpenTelemetry .NET Client (github.com)

💡Good to know -- If you wish to export traces to Jaeger, you should use the AddJaegerExporter instead of the AddOtlpExporter. Visit the opentelemetry-dotnet repository to see how it's done.

We're going to use OpenTelemetry .NET SDK. Add following nuget dependencies to the project:

We instrument the application with the OpenTelemetry SDK and SqlClient instrumentation library for .NET. First, we add the following NuGet package references to the API’s project file:

It should be handled automatically by OpenTelemetry middlewares. Just look through documentation and samples https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-dotnet

Besides that, the propagation fields (traceparent and tracestate) were added in the message header. In the last article, I said that the standard (in the Working Draft (WD) step of the w3c process) recommends to add the propagation fields in the application-properties section by the message publisher. For the current example, I chose to propagate that context in the message header even for AMQP calls as was done in the dotnet OpenTelemetry example. It's important to reinforce that Trace Context: AMQP protocol is not a W3C Recommendation yet. Take a look at the place where the propagation fields were added:

As long as the Azure Functions app knows the instrumentation key from an Application Insights instance, it traces almost everything. OpenTelemetry.NET is one of the Open Telemetry implementations, has recently released v1.0 for tracing. Both metrics and logging are close to GA. However, it doesn't work well with Azure Functions. Therefore, in this post, let's manually implement the tracing at the log level, which is sent to Application Insights.