Feature Spotlight: OpenTelemetry Support

OpenTelemetry is a collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs for generating and collecting telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces). This is very useful for analyzing software performance and behavior - especially in highly distributed systems.

Now that the tracing part of OTel is finalized, we started adding instrumentation to all relevant parts of IdentityServer - especially around input validators, response generators and stores.

The output is very useful for visualizing the control flow and finding performance bottlenecks.

Here’s e.g. the output for a request to the discovery endpoint:

When multiple applications send their traces to the same OTel server, this becomes super useful for following e.g. authentication flows over service boundaries.

The following screenshot shows the ASP.NET Core OpenID Connect authentication handler redeeming the authorization code:

…and then contacting the userinfo endpoint:

The above screenshots are from https://www.honeycomb.io.

OpenTelemetry support is part of our upcoming 6.1 release in summer 2022.