There are a lot of ways to make a web service or web request in .NET. Common libraries include HttpClient, WebClient, WCF generated clients, RestSharp, and, of course, your low-level HttpWebRequest/HttpWebResponse objects. If you want to track the true performance and amount of time it takes to make such a request, you need to understand all the steps involved in …
Today’s desktops and servers are amazingly fast. For most developers and apps, their actual code takes nearly ZERO time to execute. Almost all of the time is spent executing a database query, connecting to web service, etc. This is also why asynchronous programming is so important and has become so popular. Our goal with Prefix and the Stackify APM is …
This article is meant to illustrate a high-level comparison of how Prefix and Glimpse track SQL queries. While the two tools are similar (they’re both designed to help us understand different elements of our code’s performance) the two products have some unique pros and cons. Here’s a comparison based on our own experience with both tools. How to enable Glimpse …
Almost every ASP.NET application uses some sort of database. But from my experience, the reporting of how long SQL queries take is wildly inaccurate. In this article I’m going to explain why, and show you how you can see the real amount of time that your queries take. This article is really specific to Microsoft SQL Server but the principle …
Receiving incoming data in an ASP.NET application is a common task that most apps do. There are lots of ways of receiving data. Developers commonly write apps to handle HTML forms, file uploads, and APIs. There are a lot different types of APIs and they can receive data in JSON, XML, or other formats via ASP.NET Web API, MVC, WCF, …
We are often being asked, is it safe to run APM on production server? Would APM have an impact on our application performance? While we can’t answer for all APM solutions available in the market. After performing extensive testing, we can confidently say YES. Stackify APM+ is safe to run on production and will have only minimal effect on your …
At Stackify, we have about 1,000 SQL Azure databases. Monitoring, managing, and right sizing these databases creates a unique set of challenges. For security and scalability, each of our clients has their own database. As you can imagine, each client is in a different sizes and we have wildly different performance characteristics from one databases to another. We are excited …
JSON is easy to work with and has become the standard data format for virtually everything. Although originally derived from the JavaScript scripting language, JSON is now a language-independent data format and code for parsing and generating JSON data is readily available in many programming languages. At Stackify, we use JSON extensively for REST APIs, serializing messages to queues, and …
We are very excited to release APM+ v2.2 today! We first released APM+ for ASP.NET in April and have been working tirelessly to make it the best APM product on the market for ASP.NET application performance management. We think today is that day! First off, special thanks to everyone has used the product to date and all of your wonderful …
Exceptions in .NET can be very expensive when it comes to CPU cycles. Read how Geeks with Blogs (http://geekswithblogs.net) used Retrace to improve the performance of their application. About Geeks with Blogs (GWB) Thousands of software developers use Geeks with Blogs (GWB) to host their own personal blog. The code base has slowly morphed and has been modified by several developers over …
Distributed Method Mutexing Stackify handles millions of incoming metrics and log messages on a daily basis. This creates some unique challenges to coordinating various types of events that are triggered as data flows in and system settings are modified. When events are constantly firing for various reasons across multiple servers it can be very challenging to ensure that certain types …
Use this checklist to improve your software deployment process! Deploying software releases is a mixture of planning, testing, late hours, and celebratory beers. This software release checklist is intended to be a guide to help improve how your team achieves this complicated and sometimes hairy task. Part 1: Planning and Software Deployment Preparation Collaboration Between Development and Operations It is …
Software applications are more complex than ever. If your application is slow or down for even five minutes customers will blow up on Twitter for the whole world to see. To prevent this, developers and operations have to work together in lockstep when deploying and supporting applications. Preventing and fixing application problems quickly is critical to keep your outage from …
Today’s users (or customers) have rapidly evolving needs, are mobile, and expect 24/7 connectivity and reliability. As software product developers and vendors, we need to release updates frequently to satiate our users’ needs or else we risk losing them to competitors or alternatives. Our Response to Users’ Demands What do we do to stay ahead? As software developers, we step …
Software applications and IT operations are both becoming more complex. Today’s applications are typically composed of multiple servers, queuing, caching, databases, file storage, NoSQL, third party web services, and more. These new applications are typically more scalable and fault tolerant than traditional applications but they are also more difficult to manage and troubleshoot. Operations and development teams need remote application …
Software developers need remote server access to deploy and troubleshoot their applications. Unfortunately, even with today’s focus on DevOps, most of them don’t have the remote server access they need to do so. My team and I built Stackify to give developers the access they need to manage, monitor, and troubleshoot their remote applications. To give developers what they need …
It turns out there are a bunch of people on StackOverflow looking for ways to tail a log file, but there don’t appear to be many resources for all the different tips and tools to do this. If you’re a Java or .NET developer, just getting started with tailing log files, or a seasoned developer who needs something quick and easy to set …
Once upon a time two people from different sides of the tracks met and fell in love. Never before had the two people found another person who so perfectly complemented them. Society tried to keep them apart – “It’s just not how things are done,” they’d say. But times were changing, and this sort of pairing was becoming more socially …
When DevOps emerged in 2009, the gap between development and operations teams finally started to get the kind of media and vendor attention it deserved. DevOps gets developers more involved in IT operations so they can more rapidly resolve software issues that arise after deployment. Without access to production applications and servers, even development managers and system admins need help …
There is one particular issue that seems to be the root of most bugs in software programs. I see it over and over and over. Like most programmers, it has caused me heartburn since the day I started programming. So I have worked hard to make sure that my code never breaks my golden rule. I remind my development team …