When something goes wrong in a single application, we get a nice stack trace. In a distributed system, we get almost nothing! We add some logging, but now we have to comb through logs to understand what led to failures.

Enter distributed tracing, which provides a true end-to-end view of an operation in our system.

In this talk, we'll look at the new diagnostics capabilities in .NET 5, and how we can leverage them to expose and propagate tracing data. We'll look at new standards that help us avoid vendor lock-in for tracing. Finally, we'll look at the OpenTelemetry project and how we can leverage it to target any tracing tool with ease.