OpenTelemetry Support

You can configure your OpenTelemetry SDK to send traces and spans to Sentry.

Install

To install, add the Sentry and Sentry.OpenTelemetry NuGet packages to your project:

dotnet add package Sentry -v 5.12.0
dotnet add package Sentry.OpenTelemetry -v 5.12.0

If you're building an ASP.NET or ASP.NET Core application, add their respective packages (Sentry.AspNet or Sentry.AspNetCore) as well.

Usage

To start tracing, you'll need to add Sentry to the tracer provider. This will make it possible for OpenTelemetry spans to be captured by Sentry.

using var tracerProvider = Sdk.CreateTracerProviderBuilder()
    .AddSource(serviceName) // <-- The name of an activity sources you care about
    .AddSentry() // <-- Configure OpenTelemetry to send traces to Sentry
    .Build();

Next, initialize Sentry and opt into the use of OpenTelemetry. This allows the SDK to send OpenTelemetry spans to Sentry.

SentrySdk.Init(options =>
{
    // options.Dsn = "... Your DSN ...";
    // options.SendDefaultPii = true;
    options.TracesSampleRate = 1.0;
    options.UseOpenTelemetry(); // <-- Configure Sentry to use OpenTelemetry trace information
});

OpenTelemetry and Sentry

With Sentry’s OpenTelemetry SDK, an OpenTelemetry Span becomes a Sentry Transaction or Span. The first Span sent through the Sentry SpanProcessor is a Transaction, and any child Span gets attached to the first Transaction upon checking the parent Span context. This is true for the OpenTelemetry root Span and any top level Span in the system. For example, a request sent from frontend to backend will create an OpenTelemetry root Span with a corresponding Sentry Transaction. The backend request will create a new Sentry Transaction for the OpenTelemetry Span. The Sentry Transaction and Span are linked as a trace for navigation and error tracking purposes.

Capturing exceptions

OpenTelemetry in .NET is implemented via the System.Diagnostics.Activity namespace. However, not all of the functionality in that namespace is supported by OpenTelemetry. In particular, it is not recommended that you use the Activity.RecordException or Activity.AddException methods. Using either of these methods will result in valuable information being removed from exceptions before these get captured by Sentry.

Instead you should either log the exceptions (using ILogger) or capture the exceptions directly using SentrySdk.CaptureException.

Additional Configuration

If you need more fine grained control over Sentry, take a look at the Configuration page. In case you'd like to filter out transactions before sending them to Sentry (to get rid of health checks, for example), you may find the Filtering page helpful.