.NET monitoring is a critical aspect of .NET application development. It helps developers track the health and well-being of their applications to provide real-time performance reviews. Knowing the real status of your application ensures that users have round-the-clock access to your business site.
.NET monitoring makes sure that your business is not impacted by application issues. For example, problems experienced during site navigation can discourage customers from making a purchase from your site.
Therefore, it is important for applications to achieve optimal performance with a monitoring tool.
.NET monitoring helps developers in optimizing application performance. These tools provide quick assistance during critical events, such as low-level CPU and memory leaks.
Currently, there are three different types of .NET monitoring tools. Let’s examine each.
Bad CPU and memory usage issues can be solved with standard .NET monitoring tools. Developers turn to standard .NET monitoring tools when CPU usage is out of control. It provides proactive CPU performance tuning and monitors high memory usage, optimizes memory usage, and finds memory leaks.
These are valuable features, but are resource-intensive and will slow down your application.
Developers use lightweight .NET monitoring tools every day. As the name suggests, it provides less performance impact on codes. Its lightweight architecture is handy despite its robust tracing mechanisms. These tracing features include code profiling to understand performance at a high level.
One of the best-known lightweight monitoring tools for .NET developers is Stackify Prefix. You can install it on your developer’s workstation separate from your application. It works based on the .NET CLR profiler and requires no code or configuration changes to work. It automatically tracks the performance of their common .NET frameworks and libraries.
Learn how a .NET developer finds latent bugs with Prefix.
Recurring application issues in QA and development environments are common in software development. It is necessary to use monitoring tools that gather information on repeated problems.
In dealing with more complex software development issues, monitoring tools might not be enough. That’s where Application Performance Management (APM) comes in. Most APMs offer database queries, logging, exceptions, web service calls, and so on. More so, it helps developers understand the root cause of issues and how to fix bugs to improve application performance.
When looking for .NET monitoring tools and APMs, the primary difference is the pricing. APMs are traditionally expensive and only large enterprises are able to afford them. But what if you have a monitoring tool and an APM at the same time?
Stackify Retrace believes APM is most effective when everyone has access to tools. Retrace provides APM, server health metrics, and integrated errors and logs in one, easy to use platform. Try your free, 14 day trial of Retrace today.
When looking for a .NET monitoring tool, developers should look for the following features:
Considering these features, let’s examine five .NET monitoring tools in the market today.
Retrace from Stackify is an APM that goes beyond monitoring. It has a .NET agent that evaluates your application’s tech stack. Also, it has its own Retrace App Score based on Apdex that helps you assess your app’s overall performance. The app score serves as the overall performance indicator.
Retrace works perfectly with your .NET and .NET core applications, and it supports several web and cloud technologies such as:
Developers find that Retrace is a feature-rich APM when dealing with logs. It provides quick and easy log aggregation across all applications and servers. For example, developers can view and search across different apps and server logs. One can navigate into full-transaction tracing from a log statement.
Aside from its efficient log tagging and analysis, it also has structured logging. Logs have a defined format to .NET monitoring with automated log query configuration and monitoring.
Just like any other application, an exception is a common problem. Retrace helps developers find and resolve exceptions quickly. Developers can efficiently view logs and exceptions in one setting. Likewise, it identifies unique exceptions and tracks exception rates in one dashboard.
Another aspect to consider in app development are dependencies. Retrace monitors dependents and identifies slow dependencies using the Apdex user satisfaction rating.
Here are some detailed features in dealing with dependencies:
Tracking and monitoring are useless without real-time alert notification. Retrace can track and monitor all key application and server metrics. However, it can uncover actionable insights and facilitate automated alerts and notifications in real-time.
Not only that, developers have the liberty to create custom dashboards. How do you like working with the specific metrics and share customized app dashboards with your lead or teammates? Retrace offers adjustable settings to keep an eye on your application’s health 24/7/365.
Above all, the best thing with Retrace is it helps you walk through your application’s deployment process. It offers automated deployment tracking integrations with your preferred CI/CD tool to determine any changes in performance as you cater to specific deployments.
Lastly, it automates the instrumentation of your tech stack. For example, it can emerge client and server-side traces into one. It examines how your frontend communicates with your backend. As a result, it optimizes resource performance and creates a seamless user experience.
The .NET Memory Profiler is a robust monitoring tool to find memory leaks. It optimizes memory usage in C#, VB.NET, or any other .NET Language applications. Developers can use its profiling guides, automatic memory analyzer, and specialized trackers. These are the primary features to ensure that there are no memory or resource leaks. Making sure that the memory usage is as optimized as possible.
RedgatesANts is a monitoring tool that looks for the slowest activity in your application. It has a call tree for .NET performance profiling that shows the data for every method. Also, it identifies costly methods, database queries, and web requests.
RedgateANTS is feature-rich when it comes to .NET applications. It profiles C# and other .NET languages in a line-by-line manner. Likewise, it narrows down to code analysis with line-level timings. Find issues at a glance using the precise timing of data. It highlights complex code automatically for quick visual inspection.
The dotTrace monitoring tool detects performance bottlenecks in a variety of .NET and .NET Core applications:
Here are some extensive features to look into.
Memory leaks are always a headache for developers. AQTime is a monitoring and profiling tool for mission-critical applications. It focuses on memory and code coverage that hinders your .NET application’s performance. Fortunately, AQTime detects memory leaks quickly to easily pinpoint performance bottlenecks and code coverage gaps.
AQTime has actionable reports that simplify complex memory and performance information. It helps developers with easy bug analysis workflows. Developers can investigate the root of the problem right away.
AQTime has the following features to enhance applications performance:
Using a .NET monitoring tool application allows developers to detect user experience and performance issues. With a .NET monitoring tool, developers can drill into any component and gather reliable performance insights. These insights are significant for troubleshooting, especially with complex applications.
On the other hand, DevOps teams can proactively identify performance bottlenecks and ensure faster production rollouts. Additionally, helpdesk personnel and customer support quickly view the entire .NET service performance at a glance. This process provides quicker problem identification and rapid escalations.
Prefix and Retrace from Stackify are not just monitoring tools. They provide quick identification of code-level and database query-level. These are top-notch profilers that help you solve your .NET application problems.
Try your 14-day FREE Retrace trial today!
Stackify's APM tools are used by thousands of .NET, Java, PHP, Node.js, Python, & Ruby developers all over the world.
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