Overview

Are your monitoring tools leaving you blind to what's really happening in your distributed .NET systems? As applications grow more complex, surface-level dashboards and siloed logs aren't enough. OpenTelemetry for Unified Observability empowers developers, DevOps engineers, and SREs to gain full visibility into system behavior using open-source, vendor-neutral tools. In this hands-on course, you'll learn how to instrument .NET applications with the OpenTelemetry SDK, export telemetry data to Jaeger and Prometheus, and use traces, metrics, and logs to pinpoint performance issues, uncover hidden bottlenecks, and resolve incidents faster. Through real-world scenarios, coach-guided investigations, and a capstone project, you'll build a complete observability stack and gain practical experience diagnosing and optimizing production systems. This course is ideal for developers, DevOps engineers, SREs, and platform teams who want to improve reliability and performance using open-source, vendor-neutral observability tools with OpenTelemetry. Learners should be familiar with basic understanding of .NET applications and familiarity with containers, cloud, or distributed systems helpful. By the end of the course, you will be equipped to integrate OpenTelemetry into your applications and use observability as a strategic advantage in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and modern software development practices.

Syllabus

Foundations of OpenTelemetry

Learners will explore the fundamentals of observability by examining metrics, logs, and traces as the three essential pillars. They will also investigate the problems caused by fragmented monitoring tools and discover how OpenTelemetry addresses these challenges with a vendor-neutral, standardized approach. By the end, learners will understand how OpenTelemetry simplifies telemetry collection and strengthens troubleshooting in modern .NET systems.

Hands-On OpenTelemetry with .NET

Learners will gain hands-on experience installing and configuring the OpenTelemetry SDK in .NET applications. They will instrument an ASP.NET Core API to capture metrics, logs, and distributed traces, then export this telemetry to backends like Jaeger, Prometheus, and Azure Monitor. By the end of the course, learners will understand how to apply unified observability practices to monitor, debug, and optimize modern microservices and cloud-native systems. In this module, learners move from theory to practice by installing and configuring the OpenTelemetry SDK in a .NET API and exporting telemetry to Jaeger, Prometheus, and Azure Monitor. A coach dialogue guides them through diagnosing bottlenecks using traces and metrics, while step-by-step videos demonstrate SDK setup, configuration, and visualization with Docker-based backends. A written guide provides a lasting reference, and a hands-on lab challenges learners to instrument and trace API calls, reinforcing how unified observability enables real-world debugging and optimization.

Unified Observability in Action

Learners will explore how unified observability through OpenTelemetry enables faster root cause analysis and proactive performance monitoring. They will see how combining metrics, logs, and traces provides a complete view of .NET applications in action. By applying these practices, learners will be able to diagnose issues more effectively and ensure their systems remain reliable and performant. In this final section, learners apply everything they’ve learned to diagnose real microservice issues and build confidence as observability practitioners. A coach dialogue introduces a root cause mystery, followed by demonstrations of analyzing traces in Jaeger and monitoring metrics in Prometheus, showing how these tools complement each other. A reading on reliability engineering connects observability to resilience practices, while a hands-on lab challenges learners to troubleshoot a microservice outage. The course concludes with a capstone project to build a full observability stack using OpenTelemetry, a graded knowledge check, and career resources to help learners explore observability engineering roles. An outro video and promotional piece reinforce next steps and the broader industry relevance of OpenTelemetry.