Set up Confluent Kafka instrumentation

For the full compatibility matrix including supported installation methods, refer to Messaging systems.

This page assumes the core agent is already set up. If not, see Set up the APM .NET Agent first.

Confluent.Kafka does not natively emit OpenTelemetry activities. To enable tracing without the profiler, add Confluent.Kafka.Extensions.Diagnostics (a third-party package) to your project. This package wraps producers and consumers to emit OpenTelemetry activities, which the agent's built-in OpenTelemetry Bridge captures automatically.

Follow the setup instructions in the Confluent.Kafka.Extensions.Diagnostics package, in particular the producer configuration which requires explicit wrapping.