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asp.netperformancemonitoringproduction

Tools and methods for live-monitoring ASP.NET web applications?

I think many developers know that uncomfortable feeling when users tell them that "The application is slow (again)."

In a complex web application there can be many possible reasons for a degradation in (perceived) performance: slow database response, bandwidth issues, bad caching etc. There certainly are issues which will never occur in a development or staging environment.

Now my question:

Is there a set of tools and/or methods which would provide a comprehensive "live" state on a IIS/ASP.NET/SQL Server production system in a visually way (not just performance counters):

  • Current HTTP requests (say the last n minutes)
  • Exceptions / timeouts
  • Bandwidth data
  • Number of open database connections / database calls
  • ...

The primary goal is to see at a glance (or after looking closer) what problem is causing the performance problems.

Solution

  • I think the category of software you're looking for is ".net profiler" or ".net tracer". One such tool that you might consider is JetBrains' dotTrace. It gives you runtime stack traces and an array of counters that indicate possible bottlenecks.