Get monthly availability in Application Insights - azure-application-insights

There does not seem to be a way to query/output the availability of a monitored web application via MS Application Insights for a given month, even if it is the current month.
I'd think this would be one of the (if not THE) most important metric to monitor, so I can't imagine that this just isn't possible. What am I overlooking?
Application Insights's Analytics area seems to be limited to queries of just over a week, as is the detail data for a Web Test if one increases the time range.
Is there really no way to do that?

You can use Application Insights Export feature to bypass 8 days retention and store the results externally. As per documentation, this functionality exports web test results as well, so you'll be able to access them for as long as you store them.
Sorry if this sounds like a workaround (because it is) rather than a solution.

[Feb 2017] Data retention is now 90 days.

Related

API rate limits on calling getSyncChunk()

Given that Evernote don't publish their exact API rate limits (at least I can't find them), I'd like to ask for some guidance on it's usage.
I'm creating an application that will sync the user's notes and store them locally. I'm using getFilteredSyncChunk to do this.
I'd like to know how often I can make this API call without hitting the limits. I understand that the limits are on a per-user basis, so would it be acceptable to call this every 5 minutes to get the latest notes?
TIA
The rate limit is on a per API key basis. You'll be okay calling getFilteredSyncChunk every five minutes, although it's a little more efficient to call getSyncState instead.
In case you haven't seen it yet, check out this guide for info on sync (accessible from this page).

How to log application data?

I have an asp.net web application backed by SQL Server 2005, and I want to log a lot of application layer things like
Account creations
Account permission changes
Password changes/resets
Certain application actions taken by a user (e.g. modified some setting in the application)
Logging these things will probably end up being about 200mb-1gb per day of data and growing (spread across multiple servers).
How would I go about adding this type of logging functionality into my application?
I came across a web service called "PaperTrail" the other day, it's a managed / hosted logger.
https://plus.google.com/114380944985532634845/posts/8dH2vAQ5JRV
Having a quick look over the tour, there a free version to get you started and then they do prices per how much you want to store per month. At the time of writing, it's pretty cheap at $7 a month.
https://papertrailapp.com/
n.b. I don't work for papertrail, nor have I actually used it yet, but it looks pretty cool and might suit your needs of storing lots of data.
You can log this information with log4net as info. Using RollingFileAppender you will be able to limit the log size. Check this question for more information.
TraceListner can be used to log your activities. Check this link
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sk36c28t.aspx

Can't find page request per second statistics for IIS/asp.net?

Does anyone have any literature regarding page requests per second for asp.net (preferably MVC) applications?
I realize it is application specific, but just looking to read up on case studies etc. and expereinces.
Is 1K per second possible?
It could be anywhere from less than one to hundreds of thousands per second. Hope that helps.
If you need more specific answers, try to include something (anything) about the setup or type of app. One machine, a farm of 10,000 machines, a simple app serving mostly-static data, a scientific data processing app, etc etc -
I was looking for something similar when I saw this question. But here's a useful blog post I've come across at the same time. Golden Rule of Web Caching which has some stats which may be relevant for you.
Admittedly, your first request will include the latency of hitting the database, but if you're caching correctly afterwards, you'll get something fairly similar to Gojko's results.
So, in answer, yes. 1k hits per second are definitely achievable.
Another thing I've been trying is using WCAT (Web Capacity Analysis Tool) for testing application performance. Is not difficult to get +1k pages per second from a modest IIS setup if you focus on nice light pages.

Running a Asp.net website with MS SQL server - When should i worry about scalability?

I run a medium sized website on an ASP.net platform and using MS SQL server to store the data.
My current site stats are:
~ 6000 Page Views a day
~ 10 tables in the SQL server with around 1000 rows per table
~ 4 queries per page served
The hosting machine has 1GB RAM
I expect by the end of 2009 to hit around:
~ 20,000 page views
~ 10 tables and around 4000 rows per table
~ 5 queries per page served
My question is should I plan for scalability right now itself? Will the machine hold up till the end of the year with the expects stats.
I know my description is very top level and does not provide insight into the kind of queries etc. But just wanted to know what your gut instinct tells you?
Thanks!
You should always plan for scalability. When to put resources into doing the actual scaling is usually the tough guess.
Will the machine hold up until the end
of the year
Way too little information to answer this. If a page request takes 30 CPU seconds to process due to massive interaction with a legacy enterprise application through the four queries per page - then there's no way. If it's taking miniscule fractions of a second to serve some static content stored in the cache and your queries are only executed every half hour to refresh the content - then you're good until 2020 at the rate of traffic growth you describe.
My guess is that you're somewhere closer to the latter scenario. 20,000 page hits a day is not really a ton of traffic, but you'll need to benchmark your page and server performance at some point so that you can make the calculations you need.
Things to look at for scaling your site when it is time:
Output Caching
Optimizing Viewstate
Using Ajax where appropriate
Session optimization
Request, script, css and html minification
Two years ago I saw a relatively new (for two years ago) laptop running IIS and serving up 1100 to 1200 simple dynamic page requests per second. It had been set up by a consulting firm whose business was optimizing ASP.Net websites, but it goes to show you how much you can do.
Essentially, by the end of 2009, you expect to do 100,000 SQL queries per day. This is about 1.157 queries per second.
I am making the assumption that your configuration is "normal" (i.e. you're not doing something funky and these are pretty straightforward SELECT, UPDATE, INSERT, etc), and that your server is running RAID disks.
At 4,000 rows per table this is nothing to SQL server. You should be just fine. If you wanted to be proactive about it, put another stick of RAM in the server and bring it up to at least 2GB, that way IIS and SQL have plenty of memory (SQL will certainly take advantage of it).
The hosting machine? Does this mean that you have IIS and SQL installed on the same box or IIS on your host machine with a dedicated SQL Server provided by your hosting company? Either way I would suggest starting to take a look at how you might implement a caching layer to minimize the hits (where possible) to the database. Once this is PLANNED (not necessarily implemented) I would then start to look at how you might build a caching layer around your output (things built in ASP.NET). If you see a clear an easy path to building caching layers...then this is a quick and easy way to start to minimize request to the database and work on your web server. I suggest that this cache layer be flexible...read not use anything provided by .NET! Currently I still suggest using MemCached Win32. You can install it on your one hosted local box easily and configure your cache layer to use local resources (add memory...1gb is not enough). Then if you find that you really need to squeeze every little bit of performance out of your system...splurge for a second box. Split your cache between your current box...and the new box (allowing you to keep more in cache). This will give you some room (and time) to grow. Offloading to more cache should help address any future spikes...and with the second box you can now also focus on making your site work in farmed environment. If you are using local session..push that into your cache layer so that a request from one box or another won't matter (standard session is local to the box that it is managed on).
This is a huge subject...so without real details this is all speculation of course! You might be just right for adding better and more hardware to the existing installation.
Have you tried setting up a quick performance test using sample data? 20,000 page views is less than one/sec (assuming even distribution over 8 hours), which is pretty minimal given your small tables. Assuming you're not sending a ton of data with each page view (i.e. a data table with all 1000 rows from one of your tables), you are likely OK.
You may need to increase RAM, but other than running a performance test I wouldn't worry too much about performance right now.
I don't think the load you are describing would be too much of a problem for most machines. Of course it doesn't just depend on the few metrics you outlined but also on query complexity, page size, and a heap of other things.
If you worry about scalability do some load testing and see how your site handles, say 10000 page views per hour (about 3 views per second). It's mostly always good to plan ahead as long as you plan for probable scenarios.
Guts say: Given 10 tables with 4,000 rows each and assuming about 2KB of data per row is only 80MB for the entire database. Easily cached within memory available. Assuming everything else about the application is equally simple, you should be able to easily serve hundreds of pages per second.
Engineers say: If you want to know, stress test your application.

How would I go about figuring out the maximum load my server(s) can handle?

In Joel's article for Inc. entitled How Hard Could It Be?: The Unproven Path, he wrote:
...it turns out that Jeff and his
programmers were so good that they
built a site that could serve 80,000
visitors a day (roughly 755,000 page
views)
How would I go about figuring out the maximum load my server(s) can handle?
Benchmarking your software is often a lot harder than it seems. Sure, it's easy to produce some numbers that say something about the performance of your software, but unless it was calculated using a very accurate representation of the actual usage patterns of your end users, it might be completely different from the actual results you will get in the wild. Websites are notoriously hard to benchmark correctly. Sure, you can run a script that measures the time it takes to generate a page but it will be a very different number from what you will see under real world usage.
Inorder to create a solid benchmark of what your servers can handle, you first need to figure out what the usage patterns of your users is. If your site is already running, you can easily collect this data from your logs. Next, you need to create a simulation that will emulate exactly the same patterns as your real users exhibit... that is - view front page, login, view status page and so forth. Different pages will create a different load on the servers requiring that you actually fetch correct set of pages when simulating load on your servers. Finally, you need to figure out which resources are cached by your users, you can do this again by looking through your access log or using a tool such as firebug.
JMeter, ab, or httperf
You can create several "stress tests" and run them as the other posters are telling.
Apache has a tool called JMeter where you can create these tests and run them several times.
http://jmeter.apache.org/
Greetings.
Jason, Have you looked at the Load Test built in to Visual Studio 2008 Team System? Check out this video to see a demo.
Edit: Here's another video that has better resolution.
Apache has a tool called ab that you can use to benchmark a server. It can simulate loads requests and concurrency situations for you.
Basically you need to mimic the behavior of a user and keep ramping up the number of users being mimiced until the server response is no longer acceptable.
There are a variety of tools that can do this but essentially you want to record a few sessions activity on your site and then play those sessions back (adding some randomisation to reflect real user behaviour) lots of times.
You will want to log the performance of each session and keep increasing the load until the the performance becomes unacceptable.

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