Some parts dont apply in service environments like ASP.NET and are automatically disabled, such as Live Viewer/Packager Dialog/Error Manager Alert Dialog functionality to prevent interference; additionally, the API of this agent has been designed specifically not to attempt to display any user interface when running in service environments like this ASP.NET development environment.
As part of our latest project, we were charged with documenting scaling metrics for a containerized workload capable of processing hundreds of thousands of events every minute.
Specific metrics had to be recorded, including replica count per component and CPU and memory resources required per replica - Though external components such as Azure Event Hub had documentation regarding limits, performance testing alone allowed for proper evaluation. Another request was for documentation outlining which metrics and error logs a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) should monitor during performance investigation.
Microsoft provides an IIS web server performance counters set, including IIS server statistics for CPU usage, garbage collection, and memory usage to monitor ASP.NET core apps performance monitoring
Unfortunately, these counters can be difficult to manage because their names contain Windows process IDs; users require application performance monitoring (APM) to monitor critical applications effectively and reliably. As developers, we are integral in answering and documenting system scalability to ensure reliability during peak performance periods.
This article explores some insights weve discovered from performance testing!
Developers.dev provides developers and operations teams creating applications using the ASP.NET core developers framework - such as MVC 2, 3, 4, or 5 applications - with an all-encompassing solution for monitoring and managing the performance of these.NET apps.
With rapid installation and industry-leading scalability architecture capabilities, developers.dev help you deploy your apps more quickly and confidently than ever.
Unique ASP.NET Monitoring Capabilities
Developers.dev includes ASP.NET developers that goes beyond its core agent by adding additional capabilities tailored specifically for use with versions 2.0 or later of ASP.NET, such as:
Integral ASP.NET Health Monitoring: The ASP.NET developers for ASP.NET features an ASP.NET Health Event Provider which captures server events as they happen, such as sessions starting or ending, authentication failures, compilation errors, unhandled exceptions, and so forth - these events are recorded along with specific requests that triggered them in real-time and automatically recorded as they happen.
ASP.NET Trace Environment: An Agent was used as the conduit for added tracing capabilities on an ASP.NET environment.
ASP.NET Performance: Metrics are collected as an additional layer of web server information to track performance at each step in the ASP.NET developers processing pipeline and make it simple for administrators and visitors alike to determine how long each page takes to process, where time is being consumed, what pages are visited frequently and when.
These metrics also display what pages were visited and when.
Monitoring ASP.NET Application Performance Article
Various tools are available to you for testing and monitoring the performance of a Web application. ASP.NET core features performance counters that you can use to track application execution; additionally, use its built-in tracing feature for pages or applications for monitoring code execution.
Most ASP.NET core performance counters are made public for individual applications through Windows Performance Monitors (Perfmon.exe) per-application counters in the ASP.NET developers Applications performance object, so if multiple apps are running, when selecting which counter to monitor, you specify which application instance.
Furthermore, Performance Monitor offers a special "_Total_" application instance that aggregates counter values across the server.
ASP.NET developers makes available global counters that arent tied to an application instance; these counters can be found under the ASP.NET core performance object, and for instructions on viewing these in Windows Performance Monitor, please see Viewing ASP.NET core Performance Counters Available on Your Computer.
For further details of individual performance counters within ASP.NET performance monitoring systems and applications, please see Performance Counters for ASP.NET.
ASP.NET developers include an advanced trace feature that provides important timing data between successive trace output statements as well as details regarding server control hierarchy, view state usage, and the rendered size of controls on your page.
For more information about tracing, refer to ASP.NET core Tracing Overview.
Due to ASP.NET core running under the common language runtime, profilers can profile an entire web page from its entry point through all middle-tier objects and at its conclusion using profiling services provided by CLR.
For more information about profilers, please see Debugging ASP.NET core and AJAX Applications.
ASP.NET
ASP.NET is free. NET-based framework that enables developers to build standards-based websites, apps, and services using CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.
Using ASP.NET, developers can write web APIs that enable JSON or XML to talk to connected devices, including mobile ones. ASP.NET core provides real-time functionality via a new developer library called SignalR. SignalR leverages HTML5-based API WebSockets and other connection management APIs to easily build dynamic, multi-directional communications among servers and clients without changing an applications code.
In addition to SignalR, Microsoft provides several other frameworks to complement and extend ASP.NETs functionality. They include ASP.NET Dynamic Data, a scaffolding extension to write data drive apps; ASP.NET AJAX, a server- and client-side extension for coding ASP.NET core pages that can use AJAX functionalities; and ASP.NET MVC Framework, a framework that uses MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture to build web apps.
Introduction Because ASP.NETcore is essentially a set of libraries that runs on top of the .NET runtime, all of the capabilities that make the Developers.dev Agent work for other .NET applications also apply to web applications.
You can log directly into Developers.dev, use it with Trace or Debug, or connect it to your favorite log system. Some parts of the agent dont apply to service environments like ASP.NET and are automatically disabled to ensure they wont interfere, including the Live Viewer, Packager Dialog, and Error Manager Alert Dialog.
The entire API of the Agent is designed to be safe. It will not attempt to display any user interface when running in ASP.NET.
ASP.NET Application Flow
Developers.dev automatically discovers ASP.NET development tiers and two backends; NWTraders-WebLog and NWTraders-Portal are made up of these.
A flow map illustrates their communication by depicting the average calls per minute between tiers and the average response time per individual call.
Business Transaction Dashboard
Developers.dev developers detect user requests against an ASP.NET core web application and then create business transactions - like order-detail.
aspx in this example - using its Business Transaction Dashboard. These business transactions provide overall health indicators and key performance statistics like the number of calls per minute or slow transactions to help track business transaction performance more closely.
Transaction Snapshots
Developers.dev collects transaction snapshots containing diagnostic data to help quickly analyze and troubleshoot issues with ASP.NET core development in business transactions.
Transaction snapshots begin automatically whenever developers.dev identifies slow or stalled transactions - in this example, the orders.aspx transaction runs slowly.
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Call Graph For ASP.NET Business Transaction
Get inside an ASP.NET core transaction snapshot to reveal its call graph and code execution sequence timing so you can identify any problems within methods; in this instance, the GetResponse method took up 83.5 percent of the time during a business transaction while there was also an exit call made out to HTTP backend server.
Overall Application Performance
Developers.dev tracks metrics related to the overall application performance of ASP.NET applications. With its Metric Browser feature, Developers.dev captures key statistics of these apps overall application performance - like calls per minute at 2:03 pm as evidenced in its graph on the right; however, this spike did not significantly change average response times or errors per minute figures (blue or red respectively) over 24 hours or when problems did arise, graphs help correlate system events together for faster analysis than just visualizing a table (green/red).
Developers.dev developers Intelligence platform supports all common .NET monitoring frameworks, including:
- ADO.NET
- ASP.NET
- Async Monitoring
- IIS
Developers.dev Has Unique ASP.NET Monitoring CapabilitiesLoupe offers an agent specifically for monitoring ASP.NET 2.0, and later that extends the core agent with additional capabilities that have been designed specifically to monitor it effectively, such as:
- Integral ASP.NET Health Monitoring: The Developers.dev Agent for ASP.NET core implements an ASP.NET Health Event Provider that captures server events as they take place, such as sessions starting and ending, authentication, compilation errors, and any unhandled exceptions arising. All events and details regarding any website requests that caused these events are immediately recorded.
- ASP.NET Trace Environment: The custom trace environment utilized for ASP.NET applications is routed directly into the agent for processing.
- ASP.NET Performance: Metrics are recorded to supplement normal web server information about the performance of each stage in the ASP.NET core processing pipeline to make it easy to evaluate how long each page takes and where that time is being allocated; they also reveal which pages are being visited frequently or on which dates.
Monitoring ASP.NET Application Performance Article
Various tools are available to you for testing and monitoring the performance of a Web application. ASP.NET core includes performance counters that you can use to track application execution.
At the same time, its built-in tracing feature enables code execution tracking across pages or applications.
Most ASP.NET performance counters are exposed for individual applications in Windows Performance Monitor (Perfmon.exe) under the ASP.NET core development company Applications performance object.
To monitor multiple apps running simultaneously on one server instance, specifying each app instance when selecting counters is preferred; additionally, there exists a special "_Total__ application instance that aggregates counter values across all applications simultaneously on that server instance."
ASP.NET development company exposes global counters not tied to one application instance and stored under its performance object.
For instructions on how to view these counters within Windows Performance Monitor, see How to: View ASP.NET Performance Counters Available on Your Computer; for additional details regarding each system or app performance counter, visit Performance Counters for ASP.NET.
ASP.NET development includes an advanced trace feature that provides important timing data between successive trace output statements and details regarding server control hierarchy, view state usage, and rendered size of controls on your page.
For more information about tracing, see ASP.NET core Tracing Overview.
Due to ASP.NET core running under the Common Language Runtime, profilers allow website operators to capture a full view of an entire Web pages life from the entry point through any middle-tier objects and onto completion by using its profiling services.
For more information about profilers, please see Debugging ASP.NET and AJAX Applications - which also covers profilers as a topic!
Microsoft provides IIS web server statistics regarding CPU utilization, garbage collection, and memory consumption that help monitor the performance of ASP.NET core applications.
Unfortunately, these counters can be hard to use since their instance names use Windows process ID as part of their names; as a result, users require an application performance monitoring (APM) solution to monitor critical ASP.NET development apps accurately.
Developers.dev offers developers and operations teams building applications on top of the ASP.NET development framework (including MVC 2, 3, 4, or 5 applications) an end-to-end monitoring and management solution to deploy their apps more rapidly with greater confidence than before.
Their quick installation makes using Developers.dev solutions quick, painless, and scalable!
ASP .NET Application Flow
Developers.dev automatically discovers two ASP.NET core tiers and backends; NWTraders-WebLog and NWTraders-Portal, respectively, are comprised of this technology stack; its flow map depicts their communication as the average calls per minute between tiers as well as response times per call made.
Business Transaction Dashboard
Developers.dev can automatically recognize user requests to an ASP.NET development monitor web application and generate business transactions for each URL, such as order-detail.aspx, to display in its business transaction dashboard, showing overall health indicators such as calls per minute or slow transactions to help track business transaction performance.
Transaction Snapshots
Developers.dev can quickly analyze and troubleshoot problems with ASP.NET development company business transactions by collecting transaction snapshots with diagnostic information that helps analyze and pinpoint issues quickly.
Transaction snapshots begin automatically whenever ddevelopers.dev detects slow or stalled transactions - for instance, here, developers.dev detects an extremely slow transaction running at admin/orders/orders.aspx in our example scenario.
Drill down into an ASP.NET development transaction snapshot to display its call graph, showing code execution sequence timing so you can identify methods with problems.
In this example, the GetResponse method takes up 83.5 percent of the time (264 milliseconds) as part of business transactions, with HTTP backend calls being exited too!
Overall Application Performance
Developers.dev tracks application performance metrics of ASP.NET development applications using its Metric Browser to generate graphs of key statistics, like this graph showing calls per minute spiked at 2:03 pm without impacting response times or errors per minute - graphs help visualize such incidents when spikes do cause problems by helping to correlate different system events with each other.
Developers.dev Intelligence supports all popular.NET monitoring frameworks such as:
- Managed Windows Services
- Message Queues
- Microsoft Azure
- Microsoft Sharepoint Server
- MVC5
- ODP.NET
- Remoting Services
- WCF
Monitoring was traditionally not designed with developers or applications in mind; however, with the rise of cloud computing, PaaS applications, and serverless apps, developers need to become much more engaged in application monitoring than before.
Comprehensive ASP.NET performance monitoring involves tracking metrics ranging from server CPU usage, slow web requests/SQL queries performance metrics, and garbage collection statistics to get an overall picture. This guide will discuss how Retrace can assist in monitoring ASP.NET core web applications effectively.
Read more: Is ASP.NET a Backend or Frontend?
ASP.NET Performance Monitoring Topics:
- Web performance - Overall application performance.
- Specific requests - Maintain a close watch over "key transactions."
- Application exceptions - Error rates & new errors Recognizing slow queries and overall system slow-downs
- SQL queries - SQL Server, MongoDB, and Redis are among the many enterprise applications that experience performance issues for data storage.
- Application dependencies - Windows Performance Counters or Custom Metrics.
- Logs - Monitor application logs for specific issues.
- Request tracing - Exploring code-level performance data
Warning! Poor Performance Does Not Mean Slow
As we previously pointed out, it is crucial to make it clear: monitoring the performance of an application goes far beyond simple measures like availability or average page load time - although these metrics may play a part.
- Your application might be running quickly yet without receiving much traffic.
- Your application might be throwing an exception with every page load.
- Your application could perform optimally, yet its backend processes may not be billing customers properly.
- Your application could be doing hundreds of tasks that do not make sense yet remain active on your server.
Remember, performance issues with your application dont necessarily signify its slowness; rather, they could indicate it performs incorrectly across every area.
A comprehensive ASP.NET core performance monitoring solution should ensure your app performs as planned.
Monitoring Overall ASP.NET Performance
At a minimum, its crucial that you know if and how your application is functioning online and off. These questions must be answered as quickly and regularly as possible so customers can remain happy and receive great experiences on your site.
ASP.NET Performance
Retrace is the ideal application performance management (APM) solution to use when monitoring ASP.NET application performance, tracking its code level performance to provide detailed reporting that begins from high-level views to provide complete coverage of application performance for any given app.
Below are a few key metrics you can track about an ASP.NET application on a high level: average page load times, error rates, requests per minute, and satisfaction score (Apdex).
Application Availability Monitoring
An effective approach for this is implementing an HTTP check that runs every minute or few minutes and monitors for HTTP status 200 responses, timeframe, and HTML structure of responses as part of service level agreement reporting (SLA).
This type of monitoring also serves well for creating service level agreement (SLA) reports.
Monitoring Specific ASP.NET Requests Or "Key Transactions"
Every application contains critically important web requests, whether that means high-volume queries or page issues like shopping cart checkouts.
As part of a strong monitoring strategy for an apps overall health and performance, monitoring these key transactions should not only ensure critical functions are working smoothly but can provide valuable "pulse checks."
Monitoring the customer satisfaction score of your entire application and key web requests is highly advised to gauge performance over time.
Averages can easily become misleading; using the industry-standard apex score instead provides an objective measure.
Sometimes, it makes sense to monitor that your application is receiving traffic simply; sudden drops could indicate serious problems.
Below, we show a request per minute monitor being set up using Retrace for monitoring purposes - though any of these metrics could also be measured easily and quickly!
Monitoring ASP.NET Exceptions
Application errors are among the first places developers turn when something doesnt seem quite right with an application or its performance.
Still, these issues may occur due to various causes and can certainly disrupt operations and performance issues.
Recently, when our application began running slowly and received monitoring alerts about it, we noticed a large surge in exceptions.
We were recently aware that our hosted Azure Redis Cache was experiencing intermittent issues; had it not been for our monitoring exceptions system, we may never have known about these intermittent incidents.
Retrace offers error monitoring. It can send emails when an ASP.NET core exception occurs or when error rates increase - an excellent way of quickly and reliably detecting application problems! We highly advise monitoring error rates regularly as they provide an invaluable check against potentially oddball behavior from applications.
Retrace automatically de-duplicates exceptions and makes it simple to identify which are unique and their duration over time and other key details.
Monitoring SQL Performance
we have worked on several web applications which rely heavily on SQL databases. Unfortunately, this can lead to major performance problems with an ASP.NET application in certain scenarios.
Therefore, accurate SQL monitoring is critical in providing performance monitoring of an application such as this one.
Application Dependency Performance
Modern applications depend on various dependencies; using Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services makes it simple and effortless to leverage various platform-as-a-service offerings.
These services make using various services such as caching, SQL/NoSQL database tables, and queueing simple - we at Developers.dev make extensive use of Azure features such as Redis, SQL Azure Service Bus Table Storage & Blob Storage to do just this!
Dependencies add tremendous value to our ASP.NET applications while simultaneously creating potential points of failure within them.
Therefore, we must monitor and understand how these services impact the performance of our applications.
Here is an example of an application running fast: average page load times fall under 0.2 seconds, which is excellent.
As shown by this chart, however, "Web External" accounts for most of its total time taken; although performance issues do not exist, there may still be room for optimizations that this chart helps identify.
Monitoring Application Metrics
One popular saying goes, "If it moves, measure it". We are fortunate that the.NET Framework offers us many Performance Counters we can utilize for measuring.
By monitoring key server metrics, Performance Counters, and custom application metrics, we can obtain a broad view of application metrics.
Server Metrics
We were monitoring our applications used to involve monitoring servers. We would observe if the server was online, CPU utilization, memory utilization, and whether its disk space had become limited.
As Retrace has simplified application performance monitoring and enables us to monitor applications instead of just servers, things have dramatically transformed.
How we deploy applications has also drastically evolved; nowadays, we deploy them directly onto Azure App Services, which auto-scales them for us. Monitoring if our server is up is no longer necessary, as Azure hides servers from us. At the same time, they automatically keep everything functioning efficiently.
Server CPU usage remains one of the key metrics to track. If CPU utilization on your server peaks too frequently, your application could quickly experience performance issues, but if CPU utilization doesnt appear to be an issue and yet performance problems exist anyway, more detailed measurements may be required in order to pinpoint its cause.
Monitoring Application Logs
Application logging can be invaluable when debugging software applications, serving as the eyes and ears for developers to investigate production-related problems and gain visibility of otherwise hidden or hard-to-track items, such as your logs containing valuable insights that cannot otherwise be obtained anywhere else.
If you havent adopted one already, we highly suggest NLog, Serilog, or log4net as your logging framework of choice by sending logs via one of these frameworks to Retrace for management and advanced monitoring purposes.
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Conclusion
Application monitoring may not be part of every developers skill set, so this guide aims to cover all the basic procedures of advanced ASP.NET developers performance monitoring.
However, performance is more than simply about your code running quickly - application performance encompasses more aspects. Monitoring is also vitally important to ensure your application performs as intended. Yet, traditional monitoring does not cater specifically to developers or applications.
With the proliferation of cloud, PaaS, and serverless applications, developers must become much more involved with application monitoring than before. Proper ASP.NET developers performance monitoring involves measuring various aspects of performance such as server CPU utilization, slow web requests/queries/query execution times/metrics for garbage collection metrics, etc.
