Using Azure Application Insights to monitor a self-hosted WCF service – Part 3

 .net, Application Insights, Programming, WCF  3 Responses »
Dec 172015
 

In this part of the series I will look at using a WCF IParameterInspector implementation to time the actual WCF service operation and send the tracking metrics to Azure Application Insights.

The previous parts of this blog series have discussed adding the necessary NuGet packages to the Visual Studio project, so the Application Insights parts work, how to create a Telemetry Initializer to add information to each Application Insights tracking event, and how to use a WCF IDispatchMessageInspector to get information about each request to the WCF service.

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Using Azure Application Insights to monitor a self-hosted WCF service – Part 1

 .net, Application Insights, Programming, WCF  No Responses »
Dec 032015
 

Application Insights is a service in Microsoft Azure for Application Performance Monitoring. See more here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/application-insights/ .

I’ve previously (1, 2, 3) posted about Application Insights when it was part of Visual Studio Online. It has been moved to the Azure portal, and now has a slightly different API.

It can be used to detect crashes, tracks performance issues and usage of mobile apps, web apps and more.
I’ve used it on a few web sites hosted in IIS or on Azure, and it works great.
For ASP.net web sites, it’s really easy to set up and get going. There the VS2015 integration to it makes it really seamless, and if you can follow a few wizard steps, there is no additional setup needed.

However, if you don’t have a mobile app, an ASP.net site on Azure or local IIS or a J2EE application, then there are no wizards, and no easy setup.

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Visual Studio Application Insights – part 3

 .net, Application Insights, Programming  No Responses »
May 272014
 

In my last two posts, I described installing the Microsoft Monitoring Agent and how to enable Visual Studio Application Insights for a web application.

It seems like a lot of work, and as yet you haven’t seen what you gain by installing the agent on your web server and adding a strange configuration file to your web application. You might wonder why you should do all of that.

This is why:

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Visual Studio Application Insights – part 2

 .net, Application Insights, Programming  No Responses »
May 272014
 

In my last blog post, I talked about installing the Visual Studio Application Insights monitoring agent.

That’s all very nice. But you don’t actually gain much by just installing the agent. You need to tell it what to monitor. This post describes how to do that.

If you have web applications running in IIS, and you want to monitor their performance, you are pretty much all set by simply installing the monitoring agent, and adding a single config file to your project. The config file ApplicationInsights.config lets the monitoring agent know that you want this web application monitored, and it allows you to configure some settings about what you want monitored.

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Visual Studio Application Insights – Part 1

 .net, Application Insights, Programming  No Responses »
May 202014
 

Visual Studio Online has a relatively new feature called Application Insights. It’s currently in preview, but it already has lots of nice features for gaining insights into what is going on with your web app (or Windows Phone app or Azure web site).

I’m planning to do a few blog posts on this subject. This first part is about installing the monitoring agent and getting the first Application Insights information from my apps to the Application Insights portal.

In my current main project, we have a lot of WCF services hosted with my company’s hosting branch. We don’t have a lot of information about the service health and their use, other than what monitoring services we have built ourselves. Since that is not our main business, we decided to use a third-party service to monitor those things.

We have evaluated a few options, and decided to go further with VS Application Insights, as it seemed to be enough for our needs – and while we evaluate, its free. I guess it will come at a cost when it gets out of preview.

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