Support for custom DiagnosticSource in APM .NET Agent

oleh-zheleznyak · May 13, 2019, 2:47pm

Hi All,

Currently apm-agent-dotnet only supports pre-defined DiagnosticSources: HttpDiagnosticListener, AspNetCoreDiagnosticListener and EfCoreDiagnosticListener.

If I want more trace ability, i need to revert to "manual" api, and wrap code in Transactions and Spans.

I would like to take a standard approach in .NET and use custom DiagnosticSource and Activity classes.

It would be great if apm-agent-dotnet could provide a hook and translate some of the Activities to Spans automatically for me.

Is this a viable idea? Could this work? Any plans for that in the future?

For example, diagnostics-eventflow does a similar thing, but it writes directly to ElasticSearch, not APM Server

OpenTracing project also does a similar thing, see GenericDiagnostics

github.com

opentracing-contrib/csharp-netcore/blob/master/src/OpenTracing.Contrib.NetCore/CoreFx/GenericDiagnostics.cs

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Diagnostics;
using Microsoft.Extensions.Logging;
using Microsoft.Extensions.Options;
using OpenTracing.Contrib.NetCore.Internal;

namespace OpenTracing.Contrib.NetCore.CoreFx
{
    /// <summary>
    /// A <see cref="DiagnosticListener"/> subscriber that logs ALL events to <see cref="ITracer.ActiveSpan"/>.
    /// </summary>
    internal sealed class GenericDiagnostics : DiagnosticObserver
    {
        private readonly GenericDiagnosticOptions _options;

        public GenericDiagnostics(ILoggerFactory loggerFactory, ITracer tracer, IOptions<GenericDiagnosticOptions> options)
            : base(loggerFactory, tracer)
        {
            _options = options?.Value ?? throw new ArgumentNullException(nameof(options));

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Thanks a lot for your feedback!

GregKalapos · May 15, 2019, 11:21am

Hi @oleh-zheleznyak,

this is very interesting idea; and also thanks for pointing out the other solutions!

We already talked about having something like this within the team.

I moved this to a github issue. I think this would make sense and it could work, but I must say that I haven't spent enough time on this to think through every detail of it.

We will come up with a more detailed plan about this on GitHub, free to add more comments there, too.

oleh-zheleznyak · May 15, 2019, 11:45am

Hi @GregKalapos, thanks for your reply! Looking forward!

system · June 5, 2019, 7:47am

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Support for custom DiagnosticSource in APM .NET Agent

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