open-telemetry / opentelemetry-dotnet

Performance Optimization - open-telemetry/opentelemetry-dotnet

Performance Optimization in OpenTelemetry .NET

OpenTelemetry .NET is an open-source auto-instrumentation library for .NET applications that enables monitoring and tracing. To ensure optimal performance, several strategies can be employed. This document discusses various performance optimization options for the OpenTelemetry .NET project, with examples and references to official documentation.

  1. Benchmark Configuration

The OpenTelemetry SDK performance benchmark guidelines provide a standardized method for measuring and reporting performance. By following these guidelines, you can ensure that your application’s performance overhead remains minimal.

Example:

var tracerProvider = Sdk.CreateTracerProviderBuilder()
.SetResource(Resource.Create(new KeyValuePair<string, object>["service.name", "MyService"]))
.Build();

Reference: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/performance-benchmark

  1. OpenTelemetry Collector

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a separate process that receives, processes, and exports telemetry data from your application. By offloading this work to a separate process, you can minimize the performance impact on your application.

Example:

receivers:
otlp:
protocols:
grpc:

exporters:
jaeger:
endpoint: "http://localhost:14268/api/traces"

processors:
batch:

service:
pipelines:
traces:
receivers: [otlp]
processors: [batch]
exporters: [jaeger]

Reference: https://grafana.com/docs/opentelemetry/collector

  1. Manual Instrumentation

Manual instrumentation allows you to control which parts of your application are traced, minimizing unnecessary overhead. By selectively tracing specific methods or components, you can optimize performance.

Example:

using var activity = tracer.StartActivity("MyActivity");
// ... perform some work ...
activity?.SetTag("my.tag", "my-value");
activity?.AddEvent("MyEvent");

Reference: https://grafana.com/docs/opentelemetry/instrumentation/dotnet

  1. Sampling

Sampling allows you to control the volume of telemetry data sent to your observability backend, reducing ingest costs and minimizing performance impact.

Example:

var tracerProvider = Sdk.CreateTracerProviderBuilder()
.SetResource(Resource.Create(new KeyValuePair<string, object>["service.name", "MyService"]))
.SetSampler(new ParentBasedSampler(new AlwaysOnSampler(), 0.1))
.Build();

Reference: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/concepts/sampling

  1. Performance and Blocking

OpenTelemetry API should not block the end-user application by default and should not consume unbounded memory resources. Ensure that your implementation follows these principles to maintain optimal performance.

Example:

// Use asynchronous methods when possible
public async Task MyMethodAsync()
{
using var activity = tracer.StartActivity("MyActivity");
// ... perform some asynchronous work ...
}

Reference: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/performance

By employing these performance optimization strategies, you can ensure that your .NET application benefits from the monitoring capabilities of OpenTelemetry without sacrificing performance.