Awesome
OpenTracing API for .NET
This solution includes the .NET platform API for OpenTracing.
Required Reading
In order to understand the .NET platform API, one must first be familiar with the OpenTracing project and terminology more specifically.
Installation
Install the NuGet package:
Install-Package OpenTracing
Usage
Initialization
Initialization is OpenTracing-implementation-specific. Generally speaking, the pattern is to initialize a ITracer
once for the entire process and to use that ITracer
for the remainder of the process lifetime. It is a best practice to set the GlobalTracer, even if also making use of cleaner, more modern dependency injection. (See the next section below for rationale)
Accessing the ITracer
Where possible, use some form of dependency injection (of which there are many) to access the ITracer
instance. For vanilla application code, this is often reasonable and cleaner for all of the usual DI reasons.
That said, instrumentation for packages that are themselves statically configured (e.g., ODBC drivers) may be unable to make use of said DI mechanisms for ITracer
access, and as such they should fall back on GlobalTracer. By and large, OpenTracing instrumentation should always allow the programmer to specify a ITracer
instance to use for instrumentation, though the GlobalTracer is a reasonable fallback or default value.
Scopes and within-process propagation
For any thread, at most one ISpan
may be "active". Of course, there may be many other spans involved with the thread which are (a) started, (b) not finished, and yet (c) not "active": perhaps they are waiting for I/O, blocked on a child span, or otherwise off of the critical path.
It's inconvenient to pass an active ISpan
from function to function manually, so OpenTracing requires that every ITracer
contains a IScopeManager
that grants access to the active ISpan
through a IScope
. Any ISpan
may be transferred to another callback or thread, but not IScope
; more on this below.
Accessing the active Span through IScope
Access to the active span is straightforward:
OpenTracing.ITracer tracer = ...;
...
IScope scope = tracer.ScopeManager.Active;
if (scope != null) {
scope.Span.Log("...");
}
Starting a new Span
The common case starts a IScope
that's automatically registered for intra-process propagation via IScopeManager
.
Note that StartActive(finishSpanOnDispose: true)
finishes the span on IScope.Dispose()
.
OpenTracing.ITracer tracer = ...;
...
using (IScope scope = tracer.BuildSpan("someWork").StartActive(finishSpanOnDispose: true))
{
try
{
// Do things.
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
Tags.Error.Set(scope.Span, true);
}
// No need to call scope.Span.Finish() as we've set finishSpanOnDispose:true in StartActive.
}
If there is a IScope
, it will act as the parent to any newly started ISpan
unless
the programmer invokes IgnoreActiveSpan()
at BuildSpan()
time or specified parent context explicitly:
OpenTracing.ITracer tracer = ...;
...
IScope scope = tracer.BuildSpan("someWork").IgnoreActiveSpan().StartActive(finishSpanOnDispose: true);
Using scopes with async/await
OpenTracing contains an IScopeManager
implementation that uses AsyncLocal
to flow spans with the execution. It is therefore possible to use scopes and spans with async/await
:
OpenTracing.ITracer tracer = ...;
...
using (IScope parentScope = tracer.BuildSpan("Parent").StartActive(finishSpanOnDispose: true))
{
await SomeAsynchronousWork();
// It's still possible to access the current span
parentScope.Span.Log(...);
// The child scope will automatically use parentScope as its parent.
using (IScope childScope = tracer.BuildSpan("Child").StartActive(finishSpanOnDispose: true))
{
childScope.Span.Log(...);
await SomeMoreAsynchronousWork();
childScope.Span.Log(...);
}
}
public async Task SomeAsynchronousWork()
{
// use ITracer.ActiveSpan to access the current span - which will be "parentScope.Span".
tracer.ActiveSpan.Log(...);
await SomeExternalCall();
}
public async Task SomeMoreAsynchronousWork()
{
// The active span in this case will be "childScope.Span".
tracer.ActiveSpan.Log(...);
await SomeExternalCall();
}
Contributing
If you would like to contribute code you can do so through GitHub by forking the repository and sending a pull request.
By contributing your code, you agree to license your contribution under the terms of the APLv2: https://github.com/opentracing/opentracing-csharp/blob/master/LICENSE
License
All files are released with the Apache 2.0 license.