Technologies supported by EDOT .NET SDK

Elastic Stack Serverless Observability

EDOT .NET is a distribution of OpenTelemetry .NET SDK. It inherits all the supported technologies from the upstream SDK.

EDOT .NET sends data through the OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP). While OTLP ingest works with later 8.16+ versions of the EDOT Collector, for full support use either the EDOT Collector versions 9.x or Elastic Cloud Serverless for OTLP ingest.

Refer to EDOT SDKs compatibility for support details.

This includes the currently supported Microsoft .NET frameworks:

1. Official support begins once this is released (generally available) in November 2025

For further details, see Microsoft .NET Framework support dates and .NET Support Policy.

Instrumentation for .NET can occur in three ways:

1. Built-in OpenTelemetry native instrumentation, where libraries are instrumented using the .NET APIs, requiring no bridging libraries to be observed. Many Microsoft recent libraries implement OpenTelemetry native instrumentation, and many third parties are working on such improvements. When native OTel instrumentation exists, it may be observed directly by the OpenTelemetry SDK (and, by extension, EDOT .NET) by calling AddSource to register the ActivitySource used by the instrumented code.

2. Contrib instrumentation packages. These packages bridge existing telemetry from libraries to emit or enrich OpenTelemetry spans and metrics. Some packages have no dependencies and are included with EDOT .NET by default. Others, which bring in transitive dependencies, can be added to applications and registered with the OpenTelemetry SDK. EDOT .NET provides an instrumentation assembly scanning feature to register any contrib instrumentation without code changes.

3. Additional instrumentation is available for some components and libraries when using the profiler-based zero code installation, for which EDOT .NET does not add any additional instrumentation. Find the current list supported upstream in the .NET zero-code documentation.

See also the EDOT .NET opinionated defaults for behavior that might differ from the OpenTelemetry NET SDK defaults.

EDOT .NET support all officially supported versions of .NET and .NET Framework (an older Windows-based .NET implementation), except .NET Framework 3.5. Due to assembly binding issues introduced by Microsoft, use at least .NET Framework 4.7.2 for best compatibility.

You can export data in the OpenTelemetry-native OTLP (OpenTelemetry protocol) format through gRPC and HTTP to self-managed, Elastic Cloud Hosted, or Elastic Cloud Serverless observability.