Best practices applying OpenTelemetry with HotChocolate

[kwlin]

Hi everyone!

I'm opening this thread to gather experiences, best practices, and recommendations around using HotChocolate together with OpenTelemetry. We’re in the process of improving our observability setup and would love to learn from the community.

What we've noticed so far
While integrating HotChocolate.Diagnostics with OpenTelemetry, we observed:

• A high volume of logs when using

HotChocolate.Diagnostics.ActivityScopes.Default

• The majority of entries are for ResolveFieldValue, often with durations < 1 ms.
• This raises the question: Does logging so many field-level resolve activities indicate something inefficient in our GraphQL queries, or is this just normal behavior?

Potential workaround
We tested suppressing these logs via:

.AddInstrumentation(o =>
{
  o.Scopes = HotChocolate.Diagnostics.ActivityScopes.Default & ~HotChocolate.Diagnostics.ActivityScopes.ResolveFieldValue;
  o.IncludeDocument = false;
})

This significantly reduces noise — but we're unsure whether this is the recommended approach or if it hides valuable insight.

Related issue
In the documentation of HotChocolate & Instrumentation stated (https://chillicream.com/docs/hotchocolate/v15/server/instrumentation#execution-events):

ResolveFieldValue | Scope that encloses the execution of a specific field resolver. (*)

(*): The ResolveFieldValue event is not invoked per default, as it would be too much overhead to execute the event for each resolver used within a query. We have to override the EnableResolveFieldValue property for the execution engine to invoke the event handler.

But in the code it says:

graphql-platform/src/HotChocolate/Diagnostics/src/Diagnostics/Listeners/ActivityExecutionDiagnosticListener.cs

Line 29 in 603555e

public override bool EnableResolveFieldValue => true;

So this doesn't seem consistent for me :)

Also we have found a relevant GitHub discussion here: #7740 …but would love more community input and real-world experiences.

Questions

• How do you typically configure HotChocolate’s ActivityScopes when using OpenTelemetry?
• Do you consider ResolveFieldValue instrumentation useful in production, or mainly for debugging?
• What filtering strategies or sampling policies have worked well for you?
• Are there other best practices to balance insight vs. signal-to-noise ratio?

Any advice, examples, or thoughts are very welcome!
Thanks in advance 🙏