.NET Architecture & System Design Interview Question #150

What is OpenTelemetry and why is it useful in .NET?

Resilience, Rate Limiting, Health Checks & Observability Senior Advanced

Quick Interview Answer

OpenTelemetry is an open standard and ecosystem for generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry such as traces, metrics, and logs. It provides vendor-neutral instrumentation concepts and protocols.

Detailed Explanation

OpenTelemetry is an open standard and ecosystem for generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry such as traces, metrics, and logs. It provides vendor-neutral instrumentation concepts and protocols.

In .NET, OpenTelemetry can instrument ASP.NET Core, HttpClient, databases, and custom application operations. Telemetry can then be exported to compatible observability backends without tightly coupling application code to one monitoring vendor.

Code Example

ASP.NET Core
   |
OpenTelemetry SDK
   |- Traces
   |- Metrics
   |- Logs
   |
OTLP Exporter
   |
Observability Backend