OpenTelemetry support for .NET 10: A behind-the-scenes look

At Grafana Labs, significant efforts have been made to contribute to the open-source OpenTelemetry project, particularly focusing on the OpenTelemetry .NET SDK, which now supports .NET 10. This achievement was the result of extensive collaboration and testing with the OpenTelemetry .NET instrumentation repositories, ensuring native support for .NET 10, which was released in November 2025. The release cycle of .NET, alternating between Short Term Support (STS) and Long Term Support (LTS) versions since .NET 5, allows the community to test upcoming versions in advance, providing feedback and addressing potential issues, such as the one identified with the .NET logging source generator. The updated OpenTelemetry libraries include new features like schema URL support for metrics and traces, new ASP.NET Core metrics, and a switch to the W3C propagator for the default trace context. This development aims to enhance performance and productivity, offering developers deeper insights and improved monitoring capabilities using OpenTelemetry with .NET 10, alongside observability tools like the Grafana LGTM stack.