opentelemetry-dotnet/docs/metrics/extending-the-sdk

Extending the OpenTelemetry .NET SDK

• Building your own exporter
• Building your own reader
• Building your own exemplar
• References

Exporter

OpenTelemetry .NET SDK has provided the following built-in metric exporters:

• Console
• InMemory
• OpenTelemetryProtocol
• Prometheus

Custom exporters can be implemented to send telemetry data to places which are not covered by the built-in exporters:

• Exporters should derive from OpenTelemetry.BaseExporter<Metric> (which belongs to the OpenTelemetry package) and implement the Export method.
• Exporters can optionally implement the OnShutdown method.
• Exporters should not throw exceptions from Export and OnShutdown.
• Exporters are responsible for any retry logic needed by the scenario. The SDK does not implement any retry logic.
• Exporters should avoid generating telemetry and causing live-loop, this can be done via OpenTelemetry.SuppressInstrumentationScope.
• Exporters receives a batch of Metric, and each Metric can contain 1 or more MetricPoints.
• Exporters should use ParentProvider.GetResource() to get the Resource associated with the provider.

class MyExporter : BaseExporter<Metric>
{
    public override ExportResult Export(in Batch<Metric> batch)
    {
        using var scope = SuppressInstrumentationScope.Begin();

        foreach (var metric in batch)
        {
            Console.WriteLine($"Export: {metric.metric}");

            foreach (ref readonly var metricPoint in metric.GetMetricPoints())
            {
                Console.WriteLine($"Export: {metricPoint.StartTime}");
            }
        }

        return ExportResult.Success;
    }
}

A demo exporter which simply writes metric name, metric point start time and tags to the console is shown here.

Apart from the exporter itself, you should also provide extension methods as shown here. This allows users to add the Exporter to the MeterProvider as shown in the example here.

Reader

Not supported.

Exemplar

Not supported.

References