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.NET installation instructions

Use the installation instructions below if you're installing Helios in a standard .NET service.

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Configuring a trace provider

The first step when instrumenting your .NET service is configuring a trace provider to send traces to the Helios backend.

Start by installing the OpenTelemetry dependencies.
From your project's root directory run:

dotnet add package OpenTelemetry.Exporter.OpenTelemetryProtocol
dotnet add package OpenTelemetry.Extensions.Hosting --prerelease
dotnet add package OpenTelemetry.Instrumentation.AspNetCore --prerelease

Note that the --prerelease flag is required for all instrumentation packages because they are all pre-release.
This will also install the OpenTelemetry package.

Now you can define the trace provider by using:

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
 
    // ...
    
    services.AddOpenTelemetryTracing(
        (builder) => builder
            .SetResourceBuilder(ResourceBuilder.CreateDefault()
                .AddService("<YOUR-SERVICE-NAME-GOES-HERE>")
                .AddAttributes(new Dictionary<string, object>
                {
                    ["deployment.environment"] = "<ENVIRONMENT-NAME>"
                }))
            .AddOtlpExporter(o =>
            {
                o.Endpoint = new Uri("https://collector.heliosphere.io/traces");
                o.Headers = "Authorization=<YOUR HELIOS TOKEN GOES HERE>";
                o.Protocol = OtlpExportProtocol.HttpProtobuf;
            })
            .AddAspNetCoreInstrumentation() // adding instrumentation of incoming web requests
    );
}

For more information about automatic and manual instrumentation with .NET see the Opentelemetry documentation.

Using instrumentation libraries

In order to generate telemetry data for a particular instrumented library you can use instrumentation libraries. For example, the instrumentation library for ASP.NET Core will automatically create spans based on the inbound HTTP requests.

Each instrumentation library is a NuGet package, and installing them is typically done like so:

dotnet add package OpenTelemetry.Instrumentation.{library-name-or-type}

You can then register it when creating the TraceProvider:

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
 
    // ...
    
    services.AddOpenTelemetryTracing(
        (builder) => builder
            .SetResourceBuilder(...)
            .AddAspNetCoreInstrumentation()
            .AddHttpClientInstrumentation() // Http client instrumentation for outgoing HTTP calls
            .AddOtlpExporter(o => { ... })
   );
}

๐Ÿ‘

All set

After setup is complete and once the service is up and running, it will show up in the Helios application.

Updated about 1 month ago