From "It's Broken" to Root Cause: .NET Telemetry Your AI Agent Can Follow
AI coding agents are only as good as what they can see. Tell one "it's broken" and it reads code, guesses, and confidently fixes the wrong thing. Give it a trace ID and well-structured telemetry, and it can follow a failing request across services to the exact line that caused it.
This session covers the telemetry that makes that possible in .NET. We'll start with structured logging using message templates, then traces and spans with System.Diagnostics Activities. Next is OpenTelemetry, and why exporting over OTLP beats tying your code to a vendor SDK. Last is how traceparent and baggage carry context across service boundaries. Along the way we'll look at the small mistakes that silently break correlation, several of which I hit while building the demo.
Improving is providing pizza at 6:00 and the presentation will begin at 6:30.
| Speaker: | Russell Durham | |
| Date: | November 4th, 2026 | |
| Time: | 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM (see here for more detail) | |
| Location: | Improving - Plano, TX Google Maps |
Speaker Bio
Russell Durham is a senior consultant at Improving, where he helps teams build scalable, maintainable systems using .NET, messaging patterns, and cloud platforms like Azure. His day-to-day work includes distributed systems, OpenTelemetry, and agent-driven incident triage that follows traces and logs to the root cause. He enjoys connecting with other developers to share ideas, trade experiences, and explore better ways to build software.