What is the motivation behind only allowing a single TraceProvider in the IServiceCollection?

[solidyellowstudio]

The opentelemetry documentation for customizing the sdk has the following note.

In the same documentation, another area mentions the Sdk.CreateTraceProviderBuilder() is available in scenarios where multiple providers are required.

The motivation for my questions is that I want to add multiple trace providers to a .NET Aspire application, so I can send a specific set of traces and logs to a different OTEL application for analysis, while still maintaining the .NET Aspire standalone dashboard experience.

Are the statements in the documentation in conflict with each other or am I interpreting them incorrectly ?

Is there a different approach I should consider to send traces to multiple or different OTEL backends ?

[TimothyMothra]

Hi @solidyellowstudio, you can create multiple TracerProviders

There are two APIs available get configuring OpenTelemetry in your application. Both of these are in that doc.
https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-dotnet/blob/main/docs/trace/customizing-the-sdk/README.md#building-a-tracerprovider

• OpenTelemetry.Extensions.Hosting provides the API services.AddOpenTelemetry()

  You can think of this as a convince method, it's creating the TracerProvider (and providers for other signals) and adding them to your application's ServiceCollection which handles the lifecycle of the Provider.

• SDK.CreateTracerProviderBuilder

  You can still use this API to create an additional provider, but you'll be responsible for storing it somewhere that it won't be disposed until your application shuts down.