Dynatrace OpenKit - .NET Reference Implementation

ℹ️ We changed the default branch name to main. You can find the necessary steps to update your local clone on Scott Hanselman's Blog.
We encourage you to rename the default branch in your forks too.

What is the OpenKit?

The OpenKit provides an easy and lightweight way to get insights into applications with Dynatrace by instrumenting the source code of those applications.

It is best suited for applications running separated from their backend and communicating via HTTP, like rich-client-applications, embedded devices, terminals, and so on.

The big advantages of the OpenKit are that it's designed to

• be as easy-to-use as possible
• be as dependency-free as possible (no third party libraries or Dynatrace Agent needed)
• be easily portable to other languages and platforms

This repository contains the reference implementation in pure .NET/C#. Other implementations are listed as follows:

• Java: https://github.com/Dynatrace/openkit-java/
• C/C++: https://github.com/Dynatrace/openkit-native/
• JavaScript: https://github.com/Dynatrace/openkit-js/

What you can do with the OpenKit

• Create Sessions and User Actions
• Report values, events, errors and crashes
• Trace web requests to server-side PurePaths
• Tag Sessions with a user tag
• Use it together with Dynatrace

What you cannot do with the OpenKit

• Create server-side PurePaths (this functionality is provided by OneAgent SDKs)
• Create metrics (use the Custom network devices & metrics API to report metrics)

Design Principles

• API should be as simple and easy-to-understand as possible
• Incorrect usage of the OpenKit should still lead to valid results, if possible
• In case of errors, the API should not throw exceptions, but only log those errors (in verbose mode)
• No usage of third-party libraries, should run without any dependencies
• Avoid usage of newest .NET APIs, should be running on older .NET runtimes, too
• Avoid usage of too much .NET-specific APIs to allow rather easy porting to other languages
• Design reentrant APIs and document them

General Remarks

• All non binary files within the repository are formatted with unix style (LF) line endings.

Getting started

• Installing and updating OpenKit .NET
• General concepts
• Detailed example
• Contributing to OpenKit .NET
• Supported versions
• Upgrade guide

Advanced topics

• Building OpenKit .NET
• OpenKit .NET internals