The OpenTelemetry project provides many different components and instrumentations that support different languages and telemetry signals. However, new users often find it hard to pick the right ones and configure them properly for their specific use cases. For this reason, OpenTelemetry defines the concept of a distribution, which is a tailored and customized version of OpenTelemetry components. Here at Grafana Labs, we are all-in on OpenTelemetry.

For those who have limited experience with OpenTelemetry, it can be intimidating to instrument.NET applications. But the OpenTelemetry community created a welcome shortcut with the first stable release of.NET Automatic Instrumentation. It simplifies the process of collecting metrics, logs, and traces from your.NET applications, without applying any changes to the source code or adding any dependencies to the OSS project.

In the fast-paced universe of software development, especially in the cloud-native realm, DevOps and SRE teams are increasingly emerging as essential partners in application stability and growth. DevOps engineers continuously optimize software delivery, while SRE teams act as the stewards of application reliability, scalability, and top-tier performance. The challenge?

Docker: it’s one of those technologies that seems to be everywhere. Whether you’re a junior developer just starting out or a seasoned.NET developer, at some point in your career, you’ll most likely come across Docker for.NET. So, what is Docker?

C# is a widely used programming language in enterprises, especially for those that are heavily Microsoft-dependent. This language comprises a lot of tools with individual strengths. Here, we list C# tools for IDEs, profilers, automation tools, and more. If you build apps using C#, you most likely use Visual Studio and have explored some of its extensions to supercharge your development. However, this list of C# tools might just change the way you write C# code for good.

Modern applications are becoming increasingly distributed due to a wide range of benefits including enhanced scalability, high availability, fault tolerance, and better geographical distribution. But it also makes the overall system complex making it challenging to understand how they function internally. Distributed tracing helps to address it by tracking how requests flow through various system components with detailed insights.

While developing the "new" canonical check feature for elmah.io Uptime Monitoring, I had to parse a website from C# and inspect the DOM. I have been using Html Agility Pack in the past so this was an obvious choice. I also looked at what happened in the space and found that AngleSharp is an excellent alternative. In this blog post, I'll showcase both frameworks to help you get started.