All 16 Diagnostics & Performance questions
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.NET › Diagnostics & Performance

What is Application Insights (or OpenTelemetry) integration, and what value does it add over basic logging?

Intermediate

Answer

Application Insights (and the vendor-neutral OpenTelemetry standard it increasingly supports) provides distributed tracing (following a single logical request across multiple services), automatic dependency tracking (timing of outbound HTTP calls, database queries), live metrics, and exception tracking with full context -- going well beyond basic text-based logging by correlating related events into a coherent picture of a request's full lifecycle across a distributed system, essential for diagnosing issues in microservices architectures.
builder.Services.AddOpenTelemetry()
    .WithTracing(tracing => tracing
        .AddAspNetCoreInstrumentation()
        .AddHttpClientInstrumentation()
        .AddSqlClientInstrumentation()
        .AddOtlpExporter());
Real-world example A microservices platform uses OpenTelemetry distributed tracing to follow a single user request as it flows through an API gateway, an order service, and a payment service, immediately identifying which specific downstream service was responsible for a slow response.

Common follow-ups: How does distributed tracing correlate spans across service boundaries?;What's the difference between Application Insights and the vendor-neutral OpenTelemetry approach?

Logging;Microservices & Distributed Architecture Patterns
All 16 Diagnostics & Performance questions