Distributed Tracing in .NET
summary
Demonstrates production-ready distributed tracing for .NET using OpenTelemetry .NET and the platform ActivitySource model, wiring exporters to Jaeger (also supports Zipkin, AppInsights, Datadog). Builds a front-end and back-end demo where HTTP context propagation (ASP.NET Core 3+) produces traces visible in Jaeger via Docker, adds custom span tags with a processor, and uses dotnet watch for live edits. Notes sampling control (example: always-on sampler vs percent sampling) and that message-bus clients (Kafka) are not yet built-in.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Introduction to distributed tracing
- 1:33Observability and its pillars
- 2:16What are distributed traces
- 4:04Tracing tools and providers
- 8:29OpenTelemetry initiative
- 9:54Key tracing terms explained
- 12:23OpenTelemetry for .NET
- 13:31Hello World tracing demo
- 21:10Multi-service tracing setup
- 26:00Backend service configuration
- 28:43Frontend service integration
- 30:14Jaeger setup with Docker
- 32:03Viewing traces in Jaeger UI
- 34:34Adding custom trace attributes
- 39:40Summary and future outlook
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