EventCounter API feedback

[cijothomas]

As mentioned in #1501. OpenTelemetry .NET Sig and .NET Runtime team is looking for feedback on EventCounters API. Please comment on this issue if you have any feedback to share.

Are you using EventCounters in any way in your applications?
If yes, are you simply consuming EventCounters?
If yes, are you consuming EventCounters published by components in .NET Ecosystem (eg: .NET Runtime, Asp.Net Core etc.) or by libraries other than the ones shipped by Microsoft/.NET.
Are you publishing Metrics using EventCounters?

[Im5tu]

In short, yes to all. We publish out custom metrics, subscribing to those plus a lot of .NET metrics. Currently using custom sinks to publish to either DataDog or CloudWatch depending on use case. We have tagging etc built in using the metadata portion of EventCounters. Want to continue using them going forward as built in .NET tooling support is getting better (eg: viewing counters from Visual Studio, dotnet counters cli etc).

Approach is described in detail on my blog (more links at the bottom including how we pull the correct http stats)

[vcx]

+1 for the need or EventSource and others. EventSource is kind of new in .NET Core, but the underlying tech (ETW) a very reliable, known, and trusted for troubleshooting nasty performance problems since .NET 2.0. There's lots of tooling available to parse and investigate results, and I can't count how many times this little known part of .NET saved me in my past consulting jobs.

[cijothomas]

Closing this issue. open-telemetry/opentelemetry-dotnet-contrib#215 is to track supporting EventCounter -> New metric API.

[cijothomas]

@Im5tu if your time permits, we could use reviews on open-telemetry/opentelemetry-dotnet-contrib#177