apm-agent-dotnet is the official Elastic APM agent for .NET, a set of NuGet packages that adds distributed tracing, error monitoring and performance monitoring to .NET applications, and it is aimed at .NET developers and platform teams running ASP.NET Core, classic ASP.NET or .NET Standard 2.0 services.

What it is

The project is the .NET agent for Elastic APM. Its core project, Elastic.Apm, targets .NET Standard 2.0 and holds the Agent API, the infrastructure that reports data to the APM Server, the logging infrastructure, and auto-instrumentation for libraries that are part of .NET Standard 2.0. Every other project in the repository references that core, and each one targets a single library or framework, so instrumentation can be adopted one piece at a time. Sources live under src, and the published documentation is generated from the docs folder.

The concrete problem it solves is manual instrumentation. Instead of adding timing, tracing and error-capture calls to every web request and database query by hand, a team references the package that matches its stack and the agent instruments that framework or client automatically. For an ASP.NET Core service this means Elastic.Apm.AspNetCore for incoming requests, Elastic.Apm.EntityFrameworkCore for EF Core, and an integration such as Elastic.Apm.StackExchange.Redis or Elastic.Apm.MongoDb for downstream dependency calls.

Key capabilities

• Auto-instrumentation for ASP.NET Core through the Elastic.Apm.AspNetCore package.
• Auto-instrumentation for classic ASP.NET through Elastic.Apm.AspNetFullFramework, which ships as an IIS Module.
• Single-package activation with Elastic.Apm.NetCoreAll, which references every .NET Core related Elastic APM package and activates all auto-instrumentation at once.
• Entity Framework coverage in two packages: Elastic.Apm.EntityFrameworkCore for EF Core and Elastic.Apm.EntityFramework6 for Entity Framework 6.
• Client integrations for Elastic.Apm.Elasticsearch, Elastic.Apm.StackExchange.Redis, Elastic.Apm.MongoDb, Elastic.Apm.Azure.ServiceBus, Elastic.Apm.Azure.Storage and Elastic.Apm.Azure.CosmosDb.
• A public Agent API, documented in docs/public-api.asciidoc, for manual transactions and spans where automatic coverage does not reach.

Who uses it and how

• ASP.NET Core teams that add Elastic.Apm.NetCoreAll to a service and receive request traces without editing application code.
• Teams running classic ASP.NET on IIS that install Elastic.Apm.AspNetFullFramework and instrument through the IIS Module.
• Services that call Redis, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, or Azure Service Bus, Cosmos DB and Storage, where the matching integration package turns each dependency call into a span.
• Groups needing coverage the automatic instrumentation misses use the Agent API directly, and the project runs a public survey to prioritise which frameworks the agent supports next.

Getting started

Install from NuGet.org by referencing the package that matches the stack; adding Elastic.Apm.NetCoreAll turns the agent on and activates every .NET Core related auto-instrumentation. Full setup steps are in the Elastic documentation at https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/dotnet/current/index.html.

How it compares

No comparable tools are named in the facts available for this entry, so it stands alone in this registry rather than sitting beside a set of alternatives. Its distinguishing trait is the split between one core .NET Standard 2.0 project and a family of per-library packages that can be adopted individually or all at once.

When to use it — and when not to

A self-hoster must also run the Elastic APM Server that the agent reports to, because the agent is a client and produces no dashboards on its own. Teams that need a vendor-hosted product, or that run .NET stacks outside the frameworks listed above, should confirm current support before committing. The README excerpt is thin on configuration detail, and the project reserves GitHub tickets for confirmed bugs and enhancement requests, directing general help to the APM discuss forum, so the linked documentation is required reading.