When JetBrains announced the availability of an OpenTelemetry plugin for Rider, I decided to give it a try. I've examined the options for OpenTelemetry collection during development in the past and was curious how the new offering from JetBrains will compare.
As I was preparing a sample ASP.NET Core Web API project to test the Grafana OpenTelemetry Docker image with, tracing for some reason didn't work for me. It took me a while to realize that the problem wasn't in the sample project or the Grafana container. The .http files in Visual Studio were at fault.
OpenTelemetry is a standard for collecting all types of observability data: logging, tracing and metrics. There is an increasing number of tools that can collect OpenTelemetry data emitted from applications, but not all of them are easy and convenient to set up locally for use during development.