The OpenTelemetry .NET SDK is a set of libraries used to generate and export traces, metrics, and logs from .NET applications. It functions as an application performance monitoring tool and a distributed tracing implementation, providing the necessary infrastructure to capture system metrics and request paths across microservices.
The project includes a zero-code instrumentation library that automatically captures telemetry from popular .NET frameworks without requiring manual changes to source code. It uses a provider-based API abstraction to decouple instrumentation from specific backend implementations, allowing observability data to be routed to external backends via dedicated exporters.
The SDK covers a broad range of observability capabilities, including distributed context propagation, application log aggregation, and time-series metric collection. It manages telemetry pipelines through data processing, sampling, and routing to ensure telemetry metadata standardization across cloud-native, Kubernetes, and serverless environments.
