In this article, Steve Gordon describes methods for disabling the recording of spans (Activities) in .NET applications using OpenTelemetry instrumentation, sharing observations from his own experimentation.

Detailed Summary

Steve Gordon, a developer and advocate for robust observability, details his experience working with the .NET System.Diagnostics library to instrument code for OpenTelemetry-compatible telemetry collection. While working on personal projects (and testing Elastic’s observability tools), he encountered scenarios where recording every Activity (span) might not be desirable—whether for privacy, cost, or performance reasons.

Core Topics

  • System.Diagnostics and Activities: Steve begins by explaining the role of the System.Diagnostics.Activity API in .NET as a foundation for tracing and telemetry. These Activities, often mapped to spans in distributed tracing systems, are key to understanding system behavior.
  • Disabling Span Recording: The central focus of the article is how developers can prevent Activities from being recorded (i.e., not sent to their telemetry backend). Disabling span recording is useful in certain contexts, such as excluding noisy, redundant, or sensitive operations from observability pipelines.
  • Practical Code Example: Although the article summary provided does not reproduce code, Steve typically shares how to leverage the Activity API and OpenTelemetry instrumentation to control or suppress recording. This may involve conditionally creating Activities or using properties that affect whether an Activity is exported.
  • Pain Points and Observations: Steve notes the areas where the tooling can be improved and highlights key considerations for developers who want to selectively observe their applications, while managing telemetry volume effectively.

Key Takeaways

  • Controlling Activity (span) recording allows for more targeted, effective observability and can reduce telemetry overhead.
  • Developers instrumenting .NET code for OpenTelemetry should be aware of API options that influence which spans are included or omitted.
  • Observability tooling (including Elastic’s) should support nuanced configuration to address privacy and efficiency needs.

Resources

For developers implementing observability in .NET, this article offers practical guidance on customizing which activities contribute to tracing data, supporting efficient and meaningful monitoring solutions.

This post appeared first on Steve Gordon’s Blog. Read the entire article here