observability-edot-dotnet-instrument

name: observability-edot-dotnet-instrument description: > Instrument a .NET application with the Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (EDOT) .NET SDK for automatic tracing, metrics, and logs. Use when adding observability to a .NET service that has no existing APM agent. metadata: author: elastic version: 0.1.0

EDOT .NET Instrumentation

Read the setup guide before making changes:

• EDOT .NET setup
• EDOT .NET configuration
• OpenTelemetry .NET instrumentation

Guidelines

1. Add NuGet packages: Elastic.OpenTelemetry and OpenTelemetry.Instrumentation.AspNetCore (for ASP.NET Core apps)
2. Register EDOT in startup: call builder.AddElasticOpenTelemetry() on the IHostApplicationBuilder (in Program.cs or equivalent). Without this, no telemetry is collected
3. Set exactly three required environment variables:
   • OTEL_SERVICE_NAME
   • OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT — must be the managed OTLP endpoint or EDOT Collector URL. Never use an APM Server URL (no apm-server, no :8200, no /intake/v2/events)
   • OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS — "Authorization=ApiKey <key>" or "Authorization=Bearer <token>"
4. Do NOT set OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER, OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER, or OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTER — the defaults are already correct
5. Do NOT manually configure TracerProvider or MeterProvider — AddElasticOpenTelemetry() handles everything
6. Never run both classic Elastic APM agent (Elastic.Apm.*) and EDOT on the same application

Examples

See the EDOT .NET setup guide for complete examples.