Speaking of opentelemetry, I try to use open telemetry with my personal projects in an asp dotnet as well as with a dotnet console app. I don't have the required corporate background in opentelemetry. I had to write my own file log exporter. I didn't write it myself -- I used Claude to write it for me in jsonl format which seemed like a good way to have each row in json and for the console app, I get a file something like this
```
logs_2025-12-24_0003.jsonl
```
I asked Claude to keep it in an xdg folder and it chose
I also have folders for metrics and traces but those are empty.
I have never had a need to look at the logs for the dotnet console app I have and the only reason I have looked at the logs on the asp dotnet app was to review errors when I ran into some error on my asp dotnet application, which frankly I don't need open telemetry for.
What am I missing here? Am I using it wrong?
If you use open telemetry, where do your logs, metrics, and traces go? Do you write your own custom classes to write them to a file on the disk? Do you pay for something like datadog (congratulations on winning the lottery I guess?)
I appreciate your reply. Thank you for helping me learn.
That is, it defines a relatively small, interoperable interface that a lot of distinct products from many different vendors can "sink" their telemetry into, and then on the other end of this narrow waist a bunch of different consumers can "source" the data from.
Think of it as a fancy alternative to ILogger and similar abstractions that is cross-platform and cross-vendor. Instead of Microsoft-specific or Java-specific (or whatever-specific) sources with their own protocols and conventions, there's a single standard for the data schema that everybody can talk. It's like TCP/IP or JSON.
So your question is in some sense nonsense. It's like asking "what do you use TCP/IP for?" or "where do you put your JSON"?
The answer is: wherever you want! That's the whole point.
In Azure, you would use Application Insights, as a random example. New Relic, DataDog, Prometheus, Zipkin, Elasticsearch, or... just your console output. Simple text log files. A SQL database. Wherever!
In more practical terms, for a solo developer working on personal projects, use Aspire.NET with Visual Studio 2026. You'll get a free "local" alternative to an APM like Application Insights or DataDog that collects the traces. Keep using the "standard" interfaces like ILogger, they forward everything to OTel if you're using it.
By default, open telemmetry will try to send traces to a remote http endpoint, unless there is a local exporter in the code base to avoid that behaviour.
Otel has value for things crossing microservices in production, much less in local for a single app.
Often, languages running on dotnet or the JVM already enjoy great tooling for quite a few years, and so locally they are much better than otel.
For those on iPhones or respectable mobile network operators, not everyone has as good of an experience as you do.
For people who buy subsidized Android-based phones from some carriers such as Metro by T-Mobile USA, they either come with bloatware baked in or they download the bloatware when you first activate the device or something like that.
These things are fairly easy to disable if you know what you are doing but if you don't know what you are doing, I can imagine people will simply put up with ads showing up every time you pick up the phone. It can get annoying VERY quickly.
To play the devil's advocate, more people are born every day and as long as there are more developers today than there were yesterday, lifetime licenses can bring in a trickle of money each month, especially if the marginal cost of each new customer is zero or near zero.
> Nothing worse than being famished and getting one measly slice of pizza.
I am not exactly a big guy but even I can easily eat two slices of pizza and I am talking about real slices of the Costco pizza which I love for its value for money. I can't imagine how you could feed a team of eight with a single pizza.
Not all corruption is obvious though. Sometimes you think you are doing the right thing, "just need to bend the rules slightly over here". It is all for a "good cause". I feel like I am as much worried about people who are the righteous wrong, as much as people who are just out there trying to grift to make a buck.
> The fact is allowing any type of unsigned update on HTTP is a security flaw in itself.
Reminds me about ten years or so ago when I was installing Debian or something and I noticed the URL for the apt install mirrors were http and not https. People helpfully pointed out this is a non issue because the updates are signed.
Ok I guess but then why did Debian switch to https?
I see hundreds of tweets by @amazon that reply to people complaining how deliveries miss the dates that amazon dot com promised but then amazon dot com probably delivers so many packages every day that I think it is a bit of column A and a bit of column B here.
This makes the same classic mistake about social media about social media that my boomer dad makes.
100s people a day or even an hour is not a lot of people. It might feel like it is because in person it is but for the over 20 million packages they deliver daily it is rounding error.
This 'sandwich fallacy' perfectly illustrates why I think sports should be removed from the university system.
Universities are great 'bakeries' (centers of learning), but they’ve become bogged down trying to run massive 'sandwich shops' (commercial sports).
It’s okay for these to exist, but they should be independent entities so the school can focus on being a school.
Spectator sports should be run by the marketing department at the university and judged by their ability to bring in future students and donations - both important things that sports do for marketing. Justify your existence based on those two or get rid of those sports. Since this is a marketing department thing other departments should stay out.
There is a different class of sports though. Schools should have sports as exercise for students, and classes on how to get better at sports.
``` logs_2025-12-24_0003.jsonl ```
I asked Claude to keep it in an xdg folder and it chose
``` /home/{username}/.local/share/{applicationName}/telemetry/logs ```
I also have folders for metrics and traces but those are empty.
I have never had a need to look at the logs for the dotnet console app I have and the only reason I have looked at the logs on the asp dotnet app was to review errors when I ran into some error on my asp dotnet application, which frankly I don't need open telemetry for.
What am I missing here? Am I using it wrong?
If you use open telemetry, where do your logs, metrics, and traces go? Do you write your own custom classes to write them to a file on the disk? Do you pay for something like datadog (congratulations on winning the lottery I guess?)
I appreciate your reply. Thank you for helping me learn.