OpenTelemetry .NET Auto-Instrumentation/SDK Side-by-Side Support

[rajkumar-rangaraj]

Feature Request

Is your feature request related to a problem?

OpenTelemetry .NET Auto-Instrumentation dynamically loads OpenTelemetry .NET SDK and its instrumentation to user process and helps collect telemetry from an application without modifying the code. Issue happens when the application has a reference to OpenTelemetry SDK and user want to enable Auto-Instrumentation. In this case both user application and Auto-Instrumentation will have its own instance of TracerProvider or MeterProvider and could collect duplicate telemetries.

Describe the solution you'd like:

Auto-Instrumentation uses .NET startup hook to load the OpenTelemetry SDK and initialize TracerProvider/MeterProvider before the main application's entry point. SDK providing an option to disable the creation of the TracerProvider/MeterProvider for user-initiated providers should solve this issue. This could be implemented by adding a static bool flag in TracerProvider/ MeterProvider to stop creation of these providers. This flag can be private or public, auto-instrumentation has ability to set this through reflection. If customer use auto-instrumentation, this flag could be set by auto-instrumentation in startup and it will avoid creation of TracerProvider from user application.

Additional Context

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-dotnet-instrumentation#633

cc: @open-telemetry/dotnet-instrumentation-approvers

[rajkumar-rangaraj]

This is no more a requirement as we plan to rely on out of process auto-instrumentation.