OTel Community Day North America 2024

In the field of observability, metrics play a key role in monitoring system behavior and identifying potential issues. A reliable, high-performing, and always-running Metrics SDK is essential for monitoring the health of software systems. This session will explore the OpenTelemetry .NET Metrics SDK, highlighting its design principles aimed at performance, predictable and bounded memory usage, and memory efficiency. We will delve into the engineering challenges faced by the team and the various design trade-offs considered. We'll briefly cover performance testing techniques. A notable feature of the SDK is its ability to record measurements in as low as 10 nanoseconds, and up to just a few hundred nanoseconds, all with zero heap allocation. Moreover, the SDK includes memory limit safeguards to ensure bounded memory usage, regardless of the input, thereby ensuring that the telemetry system itself does not become an attack vector for security threats. Join us for an overview of how OpenTelemetry .NET Metrics strives to meet its performance and efficiency objectives. We'll conclude the session with actionable insights for end-users to effectively use OpenTelemetry .NET Metrics!