Distributed Tracing for .NET with Lightstep

We're excited to announce the availability of the Lightstep Tracer for .NETLightstep Tracer for .NET, now in early access. Application developers who work with Microsoft's .NET Framework 4.5+ and .NET Core can now use this tracer to instrument and observe their applications. This tracer is compatible with applications written using C# or F#, and it enables developers to use open source integrationsopen source integrations for quickly instrumenting popular technologies such as gRPC or ASP .NET Core 2.

Why .NET?

You can find .NET powering many of the world's top million websites, and ASP.NET Core has grown from its launch just over two years ago to become the fourth most commonly used web frameworkthe fourth most commonly used web framework. .NET Core takes a cloud and container-first mindset making it an ideal choice for microservice development and deployment. We're incredibly excited to take the first step towards offering .NET developers the opportunity to see the benefits of Lightstep and distributed tracingdistributed tracing such as reduced MTTR, best-in-class observabilityobservability, and the ability to profile their application performance in production.

Monitoring a .NET Core application in Lightstep

Popular integrations for .NET

The tracer fully supports the current OpenTracing API for C#OpenTracing API for C#, which means it can be used with community-supported contributions. One good example is the .NET Core Instrumentation for OpenTracing.NET Core Instrumentation for OpenTracing which extends the .NET DiagnosticSourceDiagnosticSource module with enhanced instrumentation for ASP.NET CoreASP.NET Core, Entity Framework CoreEntity Framework Core, and .NET base class libraries.NET base class libraries such as HttpClient in order to get an existing or new project up to speed quickly with tracing instrumentation. In addition, you can use ASP .NET Action Filters to quickly build your own ASP.NET tracingbuild your own ASP.NET tracing using ASP .NET MVC 4 or 5.

Next steps for .NET and Lightstep

While this tracer is currently in early access, we're excited about getting it into the hands of developers and organizations using .NET, so we can get feedback and feelings about this new addition. Over the next two months, we'll be gathering information and analyzing usage to prepare for a full release in early 2019. If you're already a Lightstep customer and you'd like to start using the new tracer, please get in touch with usget in touch with us to learn more or check it out on GitHubcheck it out on GitHub.

Interested in joining our team? See our open positions herehere.