observability-edot-dotnet-instrument

Original：🇺🇸 English

Translated

Instrument a .NET application with the Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (EDOT) .NET SDK for automatic tracing, metrics, and logs. Use when adding observability to a .NET service that has no existing APM agent.

2installs

Sourceelastic/agent-skills

Added on2026-03-17

NPX Install

npx skill4agent add elastic/agent-skills observability-edot-dotnet-instrument

SKILL.md Content

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EDOT .NET Instrumentation

Read the setup guide before making changes:

Guidelines

Add NuGet packages:

Elastic.OpenTelemetry

and

OpenTelemetry.Instrumentation.AspNetCore

(for ASP.NET Core apps)

Register EDOT in startup: call
```
builder.AddElasticOpenTelemetry()
```
on the
```
IHostApplicationBuilder
```
(in
```
Program.cs
```
or equivalent). Without this, no telemetry is collected

Set exactly three required environment variables:

```
OTEL_SERVICE_NAME
```
```
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT
```
— must be the managed OTLP endpoint or EDOT Collector URL. Never use an APM Server URL (no
```
apm-server
```
, no
```
:8200
```
, no
```
/intake/v2/events
```
)

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS

—

"Authorization=ApiKey <key>"

or

"Authorization=Bearer <token>"

Do NOT set

OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER

,

OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER

, or

OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTER

— the defaults are already correct

Do NOT manually configure

TracerProvider

or

MeterProvider

—

AddElasticOpenTelemetry()

handles everything

Never run both classic Elastic APM agent (
```
Elastic.Apm.*
```
) and EDOT on the same application

Examples

See the EDOT .NET setup guide for complete examples.