opentelemetry-dotnet/docs/metrics

OpenTelemetry .NET Metrics

Best Practices

• Instruments SHOULD only be created once and reused throughout the application lifetime. This example shows how an instrument is created a static field and then used in the application. You could also look at this ASP.NET Core example which shows a more Dependency Injection friendly way of doing this by extracting the Meter and an instrument into a dedicated class called Instrumentation which is then added as a Singleton service.

• When emitting metrics with tags, DO NOT change the order in which you provide tags. Changing the order of tag keys would increase the time taken by the SDK to record the measurement.

// If you emit the tag keys in this order: name -> color -> taste, stick to this order of tag keys for subsequent measurements.
MyFruitCounter.Add(5, new("name", "apple"), new("color", "red"), new("taste", "sweet"));
...
...
...
// Same measurement with the order of tags changed: color -> name -> taste. This order of tags is different from the one that was first encountered by the SDK.
MyFruitCounter.Add(7, new("color", "red"), new("name", "apple"), new("taste", "sweet")); // <--- DON'T DO THIS

• When emitting metrics with more than three tags, use TagList for better performance. Using TagList avoids allocating any memory for up to eight tags, thereby, reducing the pressure on GC to free up memory.

var tags = new TagList
{
    { "DimName1", "DimValue1" },
    { "DimName2", "DimValue2" },
    { "DimName3", "DimValue3" },
    { "DimName4", "DimValue4" },
};

// Uses a TagList as there are more than three tags
counter.Add(100, tags); // <--- DO THIS


// Avoid the below mentioned approaches when there are more than three tags
var tag1 = new KeyValuePair<string, object>("DimName1", "DimValue1");
var tag2 = new KeyValuePair<string, object>("DimName2", "DimValue2");
var tag3 = new KeyValuePair<string, object>("DimName3", "DimValue3");
var tag4 = new KeyValuePair<string, object>("DimName4", "DimValue4");

counter.Add(100, tag1, tag2, tag3, tag4); // <--- DON'T DO THIS

var readOnlySpanOfTags = new KeyValuePair<string, object>[4] { tag1, tag2, tag3, tag4};
counter.Add(100, readOnlySpanOfTags); // <--- DON'T DO THIS

• When emitting metrics with more than eight tags, the SDK allocates memory on the hot-path. You SHOULD try to keep the number of tags less than or equal to eight. Check if you can extract any shared tags such as MachineName, Environment etc. into Resource attributes. Refer to this doc for more information.

Common issues that lead to missing metrics

• The Meter used to create the instruments is not added to the MeterProvider. Use AddMeter method to enable the processing for the required metrics.
• Instrument name is invalid. When naming instruments, ensure that the name you choose meets the criteria defined in the spec. A few notable characters that are not allowed in the instrument name: / (forward slash), \ (backward slash), any space character in the name.
• MetricPoint limit is reached. By default, the SDK limits the number of maximum MetricPoints (unique combination of keys and values for a given Metric stream) to 2000. This limit can be configured using SetMaxMetricPointsPerMetricStream method. Refer to this doc for more information. The SDK would not process any newer unique key-value combination that it encounters, once this limit is reached.
• MeterProvider is disposed. You need to ensure that the MeterProvider instance is kept active for metrics to be collected. In a typical application, a single MeterProvider is built at application startup, and is disposed of at application shutdown. For an ASP.NET Core application, use AddOpenTelemetry and WithMetrics methods from the OpenTelemetry.Extensions.Hosting package to correctly setup MeterProvider. Here's a sample ASP.NET Core app for reference. For simpler applications such as Console apps, refer to this example.