Speaking of opentelemetry, I try to use open telemetry with my personal projects in an asp dotnet as well as with a dotnet console app. I don't have the required corporate background in opentelemetry. I had to write my own file log exporter. I didn't write it myself -- I used Claude to write it for me in jsonl format which seemed like a good way to have each row in json and for the console app, I get a file something like this

``` logs_2025-12-24_0003.jsonl ```

I asked Claude to keep it in an xdg folder and it chose

``` /home/{username}/.local/share/{applicationName}/telemetry/logs ```

I also have folders for metrics and traces but those are empty.

I have never had a need to look at the logs for the dotnet console app I have and the only reason I have looked at the logs on the asp dotnet app was to review errors when I ran into some error on my asp dotnet application, which frankly I don't need open telemetry for.

What am I missing here? Am I using it wrong?

If you use open telemetry, where do your logs, metrics, and traces go? Do you write your own custom classes to write them to a file on the disk? Do you pay for something like datadog (congratulations on winning the lottery I guess?)

I appreciate your reply. Thank you for helping me learn.