There are a few new classes in .NET Core for tracing and distributed tracing. See the markdown docs in here:
https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/tree/master/src/System.Diagnostics.DiagnosticSource/src
As an application developer, should we be instrumenting events in our code, such as sales or inventory depletion etc. using DiagnosticListener instances and then either subscribe and route messages to some metrics store or allow tools like Application Insights to automatically subscribe and push these events to the AI cloud?
OR
Should we create our own metrics collecting abstraction and inject/flow it down the stack "as per normal" and pretend I never saw DiagnosticListener?
I have a similar need to publish "health events" to Service Fabric which I could also solve (abstract) using DiagnosticListener instances sprinkled around.
DiagnosticListener intends to decouple library/app from the tracing system: i.e. any library can use DiagnosticSource` to notify any consumer about interesting operations.
Tracing system can dynamically subscribe to such events and get extensive information about the operation.
If you develop an application and use tracing system that supports DiagnostiListener, e.g. ApplicationInsights, you may use either DiagnosticListener to decouple your code from tracing system or use it's API directly. The latter is more efficient as there is no extra adapter that converts your DS events to AppInsights/other tracing systems events. You can also fine-tune these events more easily.
The former is better if you actually want this layer of abstraction.
You can configure AI to use any DiagnosticListener (by specifying includedDiagnosticSourceActivities) .
If you write a library and want to rely on something available on the platform so that any app can use it without bringing new extra dependencies - DiagnosticListener is your best choice.
Also consider that tracing and metrics collection is different, tracing is much heavier and does not assume any aggregation. If you want just custom-metrics/events without in/out-proc correlation, I'd recommend using tracing system APIs directly.
Related
Im getting started with AppDynamics capabilities, they provide different ways to collect data from the code.
One of them is Method invocation data collectors, I want to understand how this works under hood? How AppDynamics can gather this data without adding any code, api calls, just specifying the classname and method in AppDynamics UI is enough.
How they collect the stack trace details? Do they patch low level capabilities of the language itself?
Thanks
The implementation will vary per language type however generally the information is gathered through agent side configuration received from the controller to control the instrumentation.
In Java, instrumentation is done through the Java Instrumentation API - the agent being injected through the javaagent JVM flag. See https://medium.com/javarevisited/what-is-java-instrumentation-why-is-it-needed-1f9aa467433 for an explanation of the API
In .NET, instrumentation is done through CLR Profiling Interfaces - the agent being loaded from a dll as per profiler ENV VARS on the host. See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/unmanaged-api/profiling/setting-up-a-profiling-environment for related MS docs
I'm trying to refactor an existing project into PureMVC. This is an Adobe AIR desktop app taking advantage of the SQLite library included with AIR and building upon it with a few other libraries:
Paul Robertson's excellent async SQLRunner
promise-as3 implementation of asynchronous promises
websql-js documentation for good measure
I made my current implementation of the database similar to websql-js's promise based SQL access layer and it works pretty well, however I am struggling to see how it can work in PureMVC.
Currently, I have my VOs that will be paired with DAOs (data access objects) for database access. Where I'm stuck is how to track the dbFile and sqlRunner instances across the entire program. The DAOs will need to know about the sqlRunner, or at the very least, the dbFile. Should the sqlRunner be treated as singleton-esque? Or created for every database query?
Finally, how do I expose the dbFile or sqlRunner to the DAOs? In my head right now I see keeping these in a DatabaseProxy that would be exposed to other proxies, and instantiate DAOs when needed. What about a DAO factory pattern?
I'm very new to PureMVC but I really like the structure and separation of roles. Please don't hesitate to tell me if this implementation simply will not work.
Typically in PureMVC you would use a Proxy to fetch remote data and populate the VOs used by your View, so in that respect your proposed architecture sounds fine.
DAOs are not a pattern I've ever seen used in conjunction with PureMVC (which is not to say that nobody does or should). However, if I was setting out to write a crud application in PureMVC, I would probably think in terms of a Proxy (or proxies) to read information from the database, and Commands to write it back.
I have an ASP.NET MVC 3 application that I am currently working on. I am implementing a service layer, which contains the business logic, and which is utilized by the controllers. The services themselves utilize repositories for data access, and the repositories use entity framework to talk to the database.
So top to bottom is: Controller > Service Layer > Repository (each service layer depends on a single injectable repository) > Entity Framework > Single Database.
I am finding myself making items such as UserService, EventService, PaymentService, etc.
In the service layer, I'll have functions such as:
ChargePaymentCard(int cardId, decimal amount) (part of
PaymentService)
ActivateEvent(int eventId) (part of EventService)
SendValidationEmail(int userId) (part of UserService)
Also, as an example of a second place I am using this, I have another simple console application that runs as a scheduled task, which utilizes one of these services. There is also an upcoming second web application that will need to use multiple of these services.
Further, I would like to keep us open to splitting things up (such as our single database) and to moving to a service-oriented architecture down the road, and breaking some of these out into web services (conceivably even to be used by non-.NET apps some day). I've been keeping my eyes open for steps that might make make the leap to SOA less painful down the road.
I have started down the path of creating a separate assembly (DLL) for each service, but am wondering if I have started down the wrong path. I'm trying to be flexible and keep things loosely coupled, but is this path helping me any (towards SOA or in general), or just adding complexity? Should I instead by creating a single assembly/dll, containing my entire service layer, and use that single assembly wherever any services need to be used?
I'm not sure the implications of the path(s) I'm starting down, so any help on this would be appreciated!
IMO - answer is it depends on a lot of factors of your application.
Assuming that you are building a non-trivial application (i.e. is not a college/hobby project to learn SOA):
User Service / Event Service / Payment Service
-- Create its own DLL & expose it as a WCF service if there are more than one applications using this service and if it is too much risk to share the DLL to different application
-- These services should not have inter-dependencies between each other & should focus on their individual area
-- Note: these services might share some common services like logging, authentication, data access etc.
Create a Composition Service
-- This service will do the composition of calls across all the other service
-- For example: if you have an Order placed & the business flow is that Order Placed > Confirm User Exists (User Service) > Raise an OrderPlaced event (Event Service) > Confirm Payment (Payment Service)
-- All such composition of service calls can be handled in this layer
-- Again, depending on the environment, you might choose to expose this service as its own DLL and/or expose it as a WCF
-- Note: this is the only service which will share the references to other services & will be the single point of composition
Now - with this layout - you will have options to call a service directly, if you want to interact with that service alone & you will need to call the composition service if you need a business work flow where different services need to be composed to complete the transaction.
As a starting point, I would recommend that you go through any of the books on SOA architecture - it will help clear a lot of concepts.
I tried to be as short as possible to keep this answer meaningful, there are tons of ways of doing the same thing, this is just one of the possible ways.
HTH.
Having one DLL per service sounds like a bad idea. According to Microsoft, you'd want to have one large assembly over multiple smaller ones due to performance implications (from here via this post).
I would split your base or core services into a separate project and keep most (if not all) services in it. Depending on your needs you may have services that only make sense in the context of a web project or a console app and not anywhere else. Those services should not be part of the "core" service layer and should reside in their appropriate projects.
It is better to separate the services from the consumers. In our peojects we have two levels of separation. We used to group all the service interfaces into one Visual Studio project. All the Service Implementations are grouped into another project.
The consumer of the services needs to reference two dll but it makes the solution more maintainable and scalable. We can have multiple implementations of the services.
For e.g. the service interface can define a contract for WebSearch in the interfaces project. And there can be multiple implementations of the WebSearch through different search service providers like Google search, Bing search, Yahoo search etc.
I have a complex ASP.NET application and it's running since 2009.
I need to monitor it's performance and determine which methods in which layers are time or resource consuming. Then I can optimize methods.
Right now, I'm using SQL Profiler to check the queries and I tune the database step by step. I want to do the same for other layers (UI, Service, and Repository).
I've used Postsharp and Enterprise Library Policy Injection Application Block.
I've implemented some attributes and add them to some classes which helps me to get BeforeMethodEntry and AfterMethodEntry (AOP model) automatically. Therefore, I can get the execution time of each method. It also handles exception log and page view log.
But, I think there may be another implemented/standard solution to monitor the running application.
PS: I've implemented some other solution like implementing ExceptionHttpModule and PageViewHttpModule which don't need any Third Party libraries. It doesn't meet my requirements.
*In a simple words, I want to log and monitor layer's activities (specially mehod execution duration). *
You may want to look into Spring.Net Aop. If you an AroundAdvice, you will be able to start a StopWatch before the execution of the method, and stopping right after it finishes. There is a way to use it as you would with PostSharp (i.e. using attributes).
I started to use silverlight/flex and immediately bumped into the asynchronous service calling. I'm used to solving the data access problems in an OO-way with one server fetch mechanism or another.
I have the following trivial code example:
public double ComputeOrderTotal(Order order)
{
double total = 0;
// OrderLines are lazy loaded
foreach (Orderline line in order.Orderlines)
{
// Article,customer are lazy loaded
total = total + line.Article.Price - order.Customer.discount;
}
return total;
}
If I understand correctly, this code is impossible in Flex/Silverlight. The lazy loading forces you to work with callbacks. IMO the simple expample above will be a BIG mess.
Can anyone give me a structured way to implement the above ?
Edit:
The problem is the same for Flex/Silverlight, pseudo code would
do fine
Its not really ORM related but most orms use lazy loading so i'll remove
that tag
The problem is lazy loading in the model
The above example would be very doable of all data was in memory but
we assume some has to be fetched from
the server
Closueres dont help since sometimes data is already loaded and no asynchronous fetch is needed
Yes I must agree that O/R mapping is usually done on the server-side of your application.
In SilverLight asynchronous way of execution is the desired pattern to use when working with services. Why services? Because as I said before there is no O/R mapping tool at the moment that could be used on the client-side (SilverLight). The best approach is to have your O/R mapped data exposed by a service that can be consumed by a SilverLight application. The best way at the moment is to use Ado.Net DataServices to transport the data, and on the client-side to manage the data using LINQ to Services. What is really interesting about ADS (former Astoria project) is that it is designed to be used with Entity Framework, but the good folks also implemented support for IQueriable so basically you can hook up any data provider that support LINQ. To name few you can consider Linq To Sql, Telerik OpenAccess, LLBLGen, etc. To push the updates back to the server the data source is required to support the ADS IUpdateable.
You can look just exactly how this could be done in a series of blogposts that I have prepared here: Getting Started with ADO.NET Data Services and Telerik Open Access
I can't speak to Silverlight but Flex is a web browser client technology and does not have any database driver embedded in the Flash runtime. You can do HTTP protocol interactions to a web server instead. It is there in the middle-tier web server where you will do any ORM with respect to a database connection, such as Java JDBC. Hibernate ORM and iBATIS are two popular choices in the Java middle-tier space.
Also, because of this:
Fallacies of Distributed Computing
You do not do synchronous interactions from a Flex client to its middle-tier services. Synchronous network operations have become verboten these days and are the hallmark signature of a poorly designed application - as due to reasons enumerated at the above link, the app can (and often will) exhibit a very bad user experience.
You instead make async calls to retrieve data, load the data into your client app's model object(s), and proceed to implement operations on the model. With Flex and BlazeDS you can also have the middle-tier push data to the client and update the client's model objects asynchronously. (Data binding is one way to respond to data being updated in an event driven manner.)
All this probably seems very far afield from the nature of inquiry in your posting - but your posting indicates you're off on an entirely incorrect footing as to how to understand client-side technologies that have asynchronous and event-driven programming baked into their fundamental architecture. These RIA client technologies are designed this way completely on purpose. So you will need to learn their mode of thinking if you want to have a good and productive experience using them.
I go into this in more detail, and with a Flex perspective, in this article:
Flex Async I/O vs Java and C# Explicit Threading
In my direct experience with Flex, I think this discussion is getting too complicated.
Your conceptual OO view is no different between sync and asynch. The only difference is that you use event handlers to deal with the host conversation in the DAL, rather than something returned from a method call. And that often happens entirely on the host side, and has nothing to do with Flex or Silverlight. (If you are using AIR for a workstation app, then it might be in client code, but the same applies. As well if you are using prolonged AJAX. Silverlight, of course, has no AIR equivalent.)
I've been able to design everything I need without any other changes required to accomodate asynch.
Flex has a single-threaded model. If you make a synchronous call to the web server, you'd block the entire GUI of the application. The user would have a frozen application until the call completes (or times out on a network error condition, etc.).
Of course real RIA programs aren't written that way. Their GUI remains accessible and responsive to the user via use of async calls. It also makes it possible to have real progress indicators that offer cancel buttons and such if the nature of the interaction warrants such.
Old, bad user experience web 1.0 applications exhibited the synchronous behaviour in their interactions with the web tier.
As my linked article points out, the async single-threaded model coupled with ActionScript3 closures is a good thing because it's a much simpler programming model than the alternative - writing multi-thread apps. Multi-threading was the approach of writing client-server Java Swing or C# .NET WinForm applications in order to achieve a similarly responsive, fluid-at-all-times user experience in the GUI.
Here's another article that delves into this whole subject matter of asynchronous, messaging/event-driven distributed app architecture:
Building Effective Enterprise Distributed Software Systems
data-driven communication vs behavior-driven communication
Silverlight is a client technology and the Object - Relational mapping happens completely in the server. So you have to forgot about the ORM in Silverlight.
Following your example what you have to do is to create a webservice (SOAP, REST...) that can give your silverlight client the complete "Order" object.
Once you have the object you can work with it with no communication with the server in a normal - synchronous way.
Speaking about Silverlight, you should definitely check RIA services.
Simply, it brings the DataContext from the server to the client from where you can asynchronously query it (there is no need to write WCF services by hand, it's all done by RIA).
C# 5
async / await construct will almost exactly what I want..
watch presentation by anders hejlsberg