Which Tracing and Monitoring Systems Does Phobos Support?

Phobos Works with Everything

Phobos produces standard OpenTelemetry data. If your APM system supports OpenTelemetry (and they all do now), Phobos works with it. Period.

This includes:

  • Cloud Providers: Azure Monitor, AWS X-Ray, Google Cloud Operations
  • APM Vendors: DataDog, New Relic, Elastic APM, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Splunk
  • Open Source: Jaeger, Prometheus, Zipkin, Grafana Tempo

How? Phobos is just OpenTelemetry instrumentation. You configure where to send the data using standard OpenTelemetry exporters.

New to OpenTelemetry? Start Here

OpenTelemetry is now the official way .NET applications are instrumented. As of .NET 6, it's built into the platform and backed by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and every major APM vendor. Microsoft has fully adopted OpenTelemetry as the standard for .NET observability and provides official examples with OTLP.

Watch this overview to understand how OpenTelemetry works in .NET:

Tip

OpenTelemetry provides a vendor-neutral way to collect traces, metrics, and logs. Once you instrument with OpenTelemetry (which Phobos does for you), you can send that data anywhere. Learn more at OpenTelemetry.io.

The Modern Way: OpenTelemetry Collector

The recommended approach for production deployments is to use the OpenTelemetry Collector - a vendor-agnostic way to receive, process, and export telemetry data. It handles batching, retry logic, and can route to multiple backends simultaneously.

Watch our guide on setting up the OpenTelemetry Collector with .NET:

For a detailed written guide, see our blog post: The Easiest OpenTelemetry Setup for .NET Applications

Why Use the Collector?

  • Decouples Configuration from Code: Change your monitoring platforms without touching application code
  • Vendor Independence: Switch from DataDog to Grafana? Just update the collector config
  • Production Reliability: Handles retries, buffering, and batching when your APM is unavailable
  • Multiple Destinations: Send traces to Jaeger, metrics to Prometheus, and logs to Elastic - simultaneously
  • Centralized Processing: Handle authentication, sampling, and data transformation in one place

How Phobos Fits In

Phobos is an OpenTelemetry instrumentation library for Akka.NET. Here's the data flow:

graph LR A[Your Akka.NET App] --> B[Phobos] B --> C[OpenTelemetry SDK] C --> D[OTLP Exporter] D --> E[OTel Collector] E --> F[Any APM System]

Phobos automatically instruments your Akka.NET application - see what data Phobos captures and our configuration guide for setup details.

Important

Since all modern APM systems support OpenTelemetry, consult your vendor's OpenTelemetry documentation for specific setup instructions. Phobos doesn't need to know these details - it just produces standard telemetry data.

Tip

See the OpenTelemetry Registry for a complete list of available exporters.

Ready to Get Started?

See our complete quickstart tutorial for a working example with docker-compose, the OpenTelemetry Collector, and Jaeger. It takes about 10 minutes to get full observability running locally.

Next Steps

  1. Understand what data Phobos collects: Captured Data
  2. Set up Phobos in your application: Configuration Guide
  3. Try the complete example: Quickstart Tutorial
  4. Learn about OpenTelemetry: OpenTelemetry .NET Documentation

Have Questions?