OpenTelemetry Metrics Exporter for ETW

This crate contains OpenTelemetry Metrics exporter to ETW (Event Tracing for Windows), a Windows solution for efficient tracing of kernel or application-defined events, similar to user-events on Linux. ETW events can be consumed in real-time or from a log file.

ETW events created with this crate can be generated and collected on Windows Vista or later.

This ETW exporter enables applications to use OpenTelemetry APIs to capture telemetry events and write to the ETW subsystem. From ETWs, the events can be captured by agents running locally and listening for specific ETW events.

Viewing ETW Metrics

Metrics exported to ETW can be viewed using tools like logman, perfview etc. This crate currently uses a hardcoded provided GUID EDC24920-E004-40F6-A8E1-0E6E48F39D84. The payload is binary encoded in protobuf format, following the OTLP specification.

// TODO - add instructions.

Tracelog

As a command line utility, a tracelog session can be run using the following commands:

• tracelog -start MyTraceSession -f MyTraceFile.etl -guid #EDC24920-E004-40F6-A8E1-0E6E48F39D84
• tracelog -stop MyTraceSession
• tracefmt -o MyTraceFile.txt MyTraceFile.etl
• notepad MyTraceFile.txt

The payload is protobuf encoded, and won't be human readable. // TODO: Show how to decide the payload to human readable format.

OpenTelemetry Overview

OpenTelemetry is an Observability framework and toolkit designed to create and manage telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs. OpenTelemetry is vendor- and tool-agnostic, meaning that it can be used with a broad variety of Observability backends, including open source tools like [Jaeger] and [Prometheus], as well as commercial offerings.

OpenTelemetry is not an observability backend like Jaeger, Prometheus, or other commercial vendors. OpenTelemetry is focused on the generation, collection, management, and export of telemetry. A major goal of OpenTelemetry is that you can easily instrument your applications or systems, no matter their language, infrastructure, or runtime environment. Crucially, the storage and visualization of telemetry is intentionally left to other tools.