In this video you’ll escape the pain of clicking through endless CloudWatch log groups and trying to piece together X-Ray by learning how to instrument your .NET serverless apps with OpenTelemetry.

You’ll see how to set up standardized tracing with the OpenTelemetry SDK and OTLP exporter, add automatic AWS SDK instrumentation, and wrap Lambda handlers with the AWS Lambda OpenTelemetry wrapper to get rich spans and useful attributes like cold start, invocation ID, and function metadata.

You’ll also learn how to debug locally with the .NET Aspire dashboard using automatically injected OTLP environment variables, then deploy to AWS with SAM using the Rust-based Rotel Lambda Extension to export telemetry to a provider like Datadog without adding end-to-end latency. Finally, you’ll get a money-saving tip: ship logs via the extension and disable CloudWatch logs using an IAM deny policy.

00:00 Observability Pain Point
00:47 Why OpenTelemetry
01:40 Dotnet Packages Setup
02:21 Tracer Provider Configuration
03:34 Wrapping Lambda Handlers
04:46 Custom Spans and Tags
05:40 Local Tracing with Aspire
07:29 Telemetry Over Debuggers
09:01 Shipping Telemetry in Lambda
11:03 Deploying Rotel Extension
12:35 Seeing Traces in Datadog
13:23 Cold Start Overhead
14:25 Lambda Span Attributes
15:26 Bonus Save on Logs
16:55 Wrap Up and Takeaways

Source Code - https://codeberg.org/jeastham/dotnet-lambda-snippets/src/branch/main/LambdaObservabilityDemo

Serverless & OpenTelemetry ❤️ Better Together