SumoLogic OpenTelemetry in ASP.NET 4.7.2 application

Question

For settings up SumoLogic OpenTelemetry for a .NET Framework 4.7.2 application, I have followed the below steps but it does not send any Telemetry data via the collector.

As per this documentation,

1. We installed Sumo Logic OpenTelemetry Collector (https://github.com/SumoLogic/sumologic-otel-collector/releases/tag/v0.76.1-sumo-0) which is their next-generation collector, built on OpenTelemetry, that provides a single unified agent to send logs, metrics, traces, and metadata for Observability to Sumo Logic.
2. Collector works properly and it was able to record the Host (server) related data to SumoLogic. It is optional but we tested it to see if the collector works.
3. Now, we need to enable Application traces to get application performance monitoring. In order to do that, we followed the documentation (https://help.sumologic.com/docs/apm/traces/get-started-transaction-tracing/opentelemetry- instrumentation/net/). This documentation says that we need OpenTelemetry Collector (https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-dotnet-instrumentation/releases/tag/v0.7.0). Do we need both SumoLogic Telemetry Collector and OpenTelemetry collector?
4. One of the requirements for OpenTelemetry to work with .NET Framework application is to reference OpenTelemetry.Instrumentation.AspNet package. This is a pre-release version.

Questions:

1. Do we have to rely on the pre-release version of nuget package?
2. Does SumoLogic APM work with .NET Framework application? Any test .NET framework application with SumoLogic integration in GitHub repo?
3. When we uninstall the telemetry collector, all the websites in IIS are breaking with the attached error. We checked the IIS for any additional module configuration by directing accessing the IIS config (applicationHost.config) and we do not see any Telemetry related configuration but still IS failed to load any sites. We had to reinstall the IIS to fix it.

Answer 1

To establish E2E ASP.NET instrumentation, you typically need few things:

1. OpenTelemetry Collector or provider based collector, as I understand this part is working correctly on your side. It is the place where you can send data locally from instrumented applications. Then it can be exporter to the another backend, like SumoLogic. More about this here.
2. Possibility to instrument your ASP.NET application hosted on IIS. It can be achieved in 2 ways

• Installing OpenTelemetry.Instrumentation.AspNet directly into your application by following steps from https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-dotnet-contrib/tree/18b0b0319082880e939516504c1162c1cd1e51a2/src/OpenTelemetry.Instrumentation.AspNet#aspnet-instrumentation-for-opentelemetry
• Installing OpenTelemetry .NET Automatic Instrumentation. Under the hood, it is utilizing the same library instrumentation library, but you do not have to modify your code during pipeline. Everything what you need to do is to adjust you web/app.config. Please check documentation for this version how to add required configuration to config files.

Based on this, I can try to answer your questions.

Do we have to rely on the pre-release version of nuget package?

There is no other option, for now, to instrument ASP.NET applications without this package. The main reason why this package is unstable is lack of stable version for OpenTelemetry Semantic Convention (tags can be changed in the future). See this repository for details.

Does SumoLogic APM work with .NET Framework application? Any test .NET framework application with SumoLogic integration in GitHub repo?

Both OpenTelemetry.Instrumentation.AspNet and OpenTelemetry .NET Automatic Instrumentation are open-sourced, and I do not recall any important issue related to this functionality. Depending on which version you choose, you should report a new issue under one of the following repositories OpenTelemetry .NET Automatic Instrumentation or OpenTelemetry.Instrumentation.AspNet. Please follow the GH issue patters. It should allow to easier reproduce an issue and help your solution.

When we uninstall the telemetry collector, all the websites in IIS are breaking with the attached error. We checked the IIS for any additional module configuration by directing accessing the IIS config (applicationHost.config) and we do not see any Telemetry related configuration but still IS failed to load any sites. We had to reinstall the IIS to fix it.

OpenTelemetry collector or OpenTelemetry .NET Automatic Instrumentation? In both cases, more data are required to try to help you. Logs/information what kind of issue you have, etc.