Quick startedit

On .NET Core, the agent can be registered on the IHostBuilder. This applies to both ASP.NET Core and to other .NET Core applications that depend on IHostBuilder, like background tasks. In this case, you need to reference the Elastic.Apm.NetCoreAll package.

using Elastic.Apm.NetCoreAll;

namespace MyApplication
{
  public class Program
  {
    public static IHostBuilder CreateHostBuilder(string[] args) =>
        Host.CreateDefaultBuilder(args)
            .ConfigureWebHostDefaults(webBuilder => { webBuilder.UseStartup<Startup>(); })
            .UseAllElasticApm();

    public static void Main(string[] args) => CreateHostBuilder(args).Build().Run();
  }
}

With the UseAllElasticApm(), the agent with all its components is turned on. On ASP.NET Core, it’ll automatically capture incoming requests, database calls through supported technologies, outgoing HTTP requests, and so on.

Manual instrumentationedit

The UseAllElasticApm will add an ITracer to the Dependency Injection system, which can be used in your code to manually instrument your application, using the Public API

using Elastic.Apm.Api;

namespace WebApplication.Controllers
{
    public class HomeController : Controller
    {
        private readonly ITracer _tracer;

        //ITracer injected through Dependency Injection
        public HomeController(ITracer tracer) => _tracer = tracer;

        public IActionResult Index()
        {
            //use ITracer
            var span = _tracer.CurrentTransaction?.StartSpan("MySampleSpan", "Sample");
            try
            {
                //your code here
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
                span?.CaptureException(e);
                throw;
            }
            finally
            {
                span?.End();
            }
            return View();
        }
    }
}

Similarly to this ASP.NET Core controller, you can use the same approach with IHostedService implementations.

Instrumentation modulesedit

The Elastic.Apm.NetCoreAll package references every agent component that can be automatically configured. This is usually not a problem, but if you want to keep dependencies minimal, you can instead reference the Elastic.Apm.Extensions.Hosting package and use the UseElasticApm method, instead of UseAllElasticApm. With this setup you can control what the agent will listen for.

The following example only turns on outgoing HTTP monitoring (so, for instance, database or Elasticsearch calls won’t be automatically captured):

public static IHostBuilder CreateHostBuilder(string[] args) =>
    Host.CreateDefaultBuilder(args)
        .ConfigureWebHostDefaults(webBuilder => { webBuilder.UseStartup<Startup>(); })
        .UseElasticApm(new HttpDiagnosticsSubscriber());

Zero code change setup on .NET Core and .NET 5+ ( [1.7] Added in 1.7. )edit

If you can’t or don’t want to reference NuGet packages in your application, you can use the startup hook feature to inject the agent during startup, if your application runs on .NET Core 3.0 or .NET 5 or newer.

To configure startup hooks

With this setup the agent will be injected into the application during startup and it will start every auto instrumentation feature. On ASP.NET Core (including gRPC), incoming requests will be automatically captured.