Open Telemetry Support (Cloud Monitoring / Cloud Trace)

[oluatte]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
We would like to use Open Telemetry on GCP but cannot do so easily due to various issues with open telemetry support for dotnet in Google libraries. This has in a tough spot.

• Manually instrument our libraries with the google specific bits knowing fully well that the industry (and google itself) is converging on open telemetry OR
• Standardize on open telemetry and find another sink / backend for our logs.

Describe the solution you'd like
Please support open telemetry for the dotnet stack.

Additional context
Mixing and matching libraries has not been successful. Even if we use google libraries for logging and open source libraries for traces (exporting to cloud trace), the trace ids don't match up.

[jskeet]

Assigning to Amanda for a more detailed answer, but the TL;DR is that we're aware that this is an area we could do a lot more in, and we'd definitely like to. We're busy with other work at the moment, but this is definitely on our backlog. I know that's not much of a consolation at the moment. I hope that when we eventually get to it, we'll be able to provide a nice solution that provides tracing with all the client libraries "for free" etc.

[oluatte]

Thanks, Jon.

Also want to point that we would love to hear about any workarounds / alternative paths that we can use in the mean time. We've recently heard about the Open Telemetry Collector for example, but not sure this is a valid workaround for this.

[amanda-tarafa]

@mayoatte Will try to get this started/done on the second half of the year, but that's a soft commitent for now. Again I'm sorry this is not a good answer for you at this moment.

Mixing and matching libraries has not been successful. Even if we use google libraries for logging and open source libraries for traces (exporting to cloud trace), the trace ids don't match up.

If the Google libraries that you are using for logging are the Google.Cloud.Diagnostics libraries, then those will attempt to use Google's own trace header by default to extract tracing context to include in the log entry. You can inject a transient Google.Cloud.Diagnostics.Common.ITraceContext that fetches the context from the Open Telemetry tracing context instead, and that will be used to append tracing information to log entries.

[oluatte]

Thanks, Amanda.

We will try setting the trace context manually. And look forward to your open telemetry efforts.

[amanda-tarafa]

Reassigning to @Rishabh-V as he's looking into this.

[atrauzzi]

I'd really like to be able to use the standard OpenTelemetry libraries not only for instrumenting my code, but also for the export format.

I talk more about this desire here: open-telemetry/community#984

Basically, I would like to see a way to do OpenTelemetry without having to install a single google-specific package in my application. Instead, I should be able to configure the standard otel wire protocol exporter with a hostname that is "well known" on all google compute offerings (Cloud Run!).