Application Insights Behind a Firewall - asp.net

I'm having issues getting application insights to report data to Visual Studio Online from behind our firewall. I opened the firewall rules noted in this article but it didn't make a difference. I've uninstalled and reinstalled several times. The only thing that is showing up in the Operations Logs is that it's periodically purging items in the "AppDiagnostics" queue since exceed the maximum allowed size of 15 MB (full error below).
Get-WebApplicationMonitoringStatus shows all the applications I would expect to be monitored being monitored.
The health service has removed some items from the send queue for management group "AppDiagnostics" since it exceeded the maximum allowed size of 15 megabytes.

The IP addresses and hosts that you need to configure/allow are officially documented here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/application-insights/app-insights-ip-addresses
I'd copy and paste the "relevant" portions, but
there's a huge number of them depending on what you want/need to do and
then they'd be wrong here whenever the above doc is updated

Related

Applcation pool claiming more private memory if physical memory is added

Good day,
Our production servers (w2k2012 with iis8.x) got a memory upgrade recently from 4GB to 8GB. The reason was that application pools (20-30, one per mvc/.net application were claiming too much memory (reaching the 5% limit).
We used the private bytes claimed by the worker processes to find out how much memory was reserved per pool. This was about 300-400MB per pool.
After the memory upgrade the same pools now claimed 600-800GB. We verified on our development machines with even more memory and there the claim got even higher (up to 1GB).
So now our in-house hoster things adding more memory does not make sense.
My questions:
- Why are the pools taking memory relative to the physical memory (so it appears)? I could not find information about this, only that the maximum for private bytes is 60% of physical memory, not the actual claim would increase too for the same pool if more physical memory is added.
- How can we influence this? Is setting private byte limit per pool the solution?
We hoped to be able to add more customers to our server by adding more memory.
Best regards, Rob
You may be seeing an increase in Standy memory which is actually available. An interesting link with some related details is Where has all my Physical RAM Gone?
The related part is
Standby: Pages of physical ram not actively being used. These are still left in physical ram but will be repurposed first by the memory
manager (either returned to the active list or zeroed out and reused)
if something needs physical ram for active pages. Standby pages are
essentially cache – it’s better to have infrequently used data kept in
RAM “just in case” than pushing it out to disk when the memory isn’t
needed for anything else.
In general it is the operating taking as much of it as it can, just in case it needs it. This happens on Windows 7 as well in a similar manner. A computer with a couple of browser tabs and Outlook open is using 5 GB of memory, but will free up unused portions as needed.
On a 2012R2 development server, I see something similar
As you mentioned, you can also limit the memory usage of an App Pool within IIS itself. It sounds like you may know how to do this but in case it helps you or others:
You can limit memory taken by an App Pool
Open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager
Navigate to the Application Pool section
Click once on the App Pool you'd like to limit
On the right side under the Actions pane, click Recycling...
Within the window that appears, you can choose your preferred options under Memory Based Maximums
In general I'm suspecting you'll be okay to add more customers to your server, unless you have some heavy hitting web applications currently running. You may consider setting a reasonable limit for the memory for a few App Pools and see if it has any effect on the application in terms of performance and test what works.
This will give you a better idea of how many additional customers you could host reasonably.
You may also want to set a limit to the App Pools in terms of memory to prevent customer sites from taking resources away from other customer sites. This of course completely depends on your environment and what type of loads the server handles at certain times.

pandorafms monitoring

I'm newbie for network monitoring. I'm using pandorafms 4.0.2 free version. I added about 1,167 agents and 5,831 remote monitors. unknown agent and unknown monitor level is high. number of unknown monitors/agent increase and decrease but it didn't reach to "0". i check few unknown monitors randomly and ping their ip addresses from terminal. result shows they are alive but pandorafms show them as in unknown state. i checked them after about 6 hours. but network lag is still in high value.need help.(I use ubuntu server)
The behavior you describe could be because of two reasons:
A lack of resources in the server. Normally a Pandora server can monitor 2000 devices but it depends on the resources of the server which hosts Pandora. You can check the minimum requirements here.
It could be a bug :-), in 4.x version a bug related to network monitoring was detected. This bug causes some random failures monitoring using ping.
I would update your installation to the new 5.0 version and if the unknown modules persists, you can check the problem of lack of resources by disabling some agents. Also you can check some tips to configure Pandora for large environments here.
Hope it helps.

ASP.NET Requests Queued causes website to crumble. SQL backend, IIS6

I have inherited a somewhat complex system (and problem) that I need help with.
I have a webserver w/ the following specs:
Hardware:
Server 2003 32bit
IIS 6
8 cores (16 w/ hyperthreading)
12gb RAM
ASP.NET site
3 app pools, so 3 instances of w3wp.exe running.
This system serves a large number of people and bandwidth is fairly constant during business hours reaching ~ 68,000kbit/s
There are moments when the system "comes down" - site gets very slow which generates a lot of phone calls. Things usually slow down for 60 seconds, but has varied greatly in length. Sometimes only a few seconds and sometimes 3 minutes or more.
I have my app pools set to recycle somewhere about 600mb of consumed memory. That's not exact but they recycle on their own with much success. At times I recycle the "main" pool manually to clear the problem I'm describing.
This is what I know is going on when things are running slow.
Network bandwidth takes a considerable dip.
Requests Queued in the ASP.NET performance counters goes up.
In tandem w/ the Requests Queued rising page latency increases. (I employ a simple ASP page that makes a SQL call and just says "The system is live" - this page is monitored for latency)
Overall CPU usage rises.
Overall memory consumption of w3wp.exe rises.
In my mind here is what I imagine is happening.
Someone asks the system to generate a report or glob of data. This spins up a process that consumes a large number of threads (ie, all available threads) This causes all other requests to the system to wait in the ASP.NET que pool which essentially kills the site. The lack of activity causes the network traffic to dip.
I have read many articles about thread queues, thread pools, etc. This is a good example: http://williablog.net/williablog/post/2008/12/02/Increase-ASPNET-Scalability-Instantly.aspx and does what I believe is a clue to help me solve my problem... but I'm not sure. My "Machine.config" file for the version of asp.net that I am using does not specify any of the thread values listed in the article so we are default for everything which I believe is incorrect given our situation.
If you were me; What would you do next? Where do you think the problem is?
edit: Here is a screenshot. It should be obvious when the problem is happening.
http://i.imgur.com/5BJlq.png
edit:
I want to change these values for our setup. A few questions first:
1) After making the changes, what needs to be restarted for them to take effect?
2) How do these settings look for a system with 8 physical cores?
maxconnection = 96
maxIoThreads = 100
maxWorkerThreads = 100
minFreeThreads = 704
minLocalRequestFreeThreads = 608
Not fun.
Many root causes share common symptoms which makes it difficult to diagnose without getting dirty with the application. :) Pardon if some of these steps were implied.
Some next steps might be:
Review the IIS logs of each site looking for things like:
HTTP response codes (5xx,4xx,3xx)
Request response times
Review Windows Event Logs
How often are application pools cycling?
Application errors, etc.
Verify processModel settings as suggested by #vinayc to make sure predecessor didn't get 'tricky'
Install DebugDiag, its a surprisingly good tool for some basic analysis of memory and crash related problems.
This can also help you capture memory snaps to diagnose later.
Tess Ferrandez blog can help make heads/tails of memory snap analysis.
Understand how many web applications are running in each AppPool.
Investigate using a 'web garden' to possibly help minimize number of users impacted by 'slow down'
Is a virus scanner enabled? Is it running? If so, verify exclusions.
Are application teams available to help troubleshoot? Identify if they have any custom application instrumentation that might help diagnose problem.
Is the behavior 'new'? Or has it always been there? If 'new', can you track down which deployment might have caused the new behavior?
Could the the description given of the 'slow down' behavior be attributed to an apppool recycle and resulting jitting of the application again? ala - the first request syndrome.
Reviewing the logs helps understand how the sites/applications are being used, which can be especially important if you don't own the codebase. Logparser is an excellent tool for doing some IIS log analysis (as well as other formats).
Good luck!
Z
The settings that your are talking are part of processModel element under system.web element from machine.config. For IIS6, following are applicable:
autoConfig
maxIoThreads
maxWorkerThreads
minIoThreads
minWorkerThreads
requestQueueLimit
responseDeadlockInterval
Typically, you will only find autoConfig="true" and not other elements. Auto-config sets the values as per your machine configuration - the tuning is done as per recommended values (see Threading Explained section from this article) which are same as sighted by the link that you have provided.
The article although dated, i excellent resource if you want to tune up these settings manually.
On the other hand, at the load that you are serving, I would recommend two things (if you haven't tried already)
Use output caching aggressively - even if the data is dynamic, caching for say 30-60 seconds can give a definite boost at your load
If you suspect certain requests are hogging too many threads then attempt to move those resources under different app-pool (you can use different web-site with different sub-domain or you can use different virtual directory/application and choose different app-pool)

Slow BizTalk File Receive

I have an application with a file receive location. After the host instance has been running for a few hours the receive location fails to identify new files dropped into the folder that it is monitoring. It doesn't forget about them altogether, it's just that performance grinds to a crawl. The receive location is configured to poll the target folder every 60 seconds but after host instance has been running for an hour or so, then it seems that the target folder is being polled only every thirty minutes. If I restart the host instance then the files waiting in the target folder are collected right away and performance is fine for the next hour or so.
The same application runs fine in a different environment.
There are now obvious entries in the event log related to the problem.
All the BizTalk SQL jobs are running fine except for Backup BizTalk Server (BizTalkMgmtDb).
Any suggestions gratefully received.
Thanks
Rob
Here are some additional tools which may help you identify and diagnose BizTalk database issues.
BizTalk MsgBox Viewer
Here is a tool to repair identified errors:
Terminator
Use at your own risk... read the glogs and docs. Start with the message box viewer and let us know our results.
Without more details, the biggest tell is that your Backup Job is failing. If the backup job is failing, it may not be properly configured. If it is properly configured and still failing, then you've got other issues. Can you give us some more information about your BizTalk install.
What version are you running?
What are our database sizes?
What are your purge and archive settings like?
Is there any long running blocks in your SQL Server DB coming from BizTalk?
Another thing to consider is the user accounts the send, receive and orchestration hosts are running under. Please check the BizTalk Administration Console. If they are all running the same account, sometimes the orchestrations can starve the send and receive processes of CPU time. I believe priority is given to orchestrations then receive, then send. Even if you are just developing, it is useful to use separate accounts for this. This also improves security.
The Wrox BizTalk Server 2006 will also supply tuning advice.
What other things are going on with the server? Is BizTalk pegged otherwise or is it idle?
You mention that the solution does not have any problems in another environment, so it's likely that there is a configuration problem.
Check the following:
** On SQL Server, set some upper memory limit for SQL Server. By default, SQL Server uses whatever it can get and then hangs onto it, so set a reasonable limit so that your system can operate without spending a lot of time paging memory onto and from your hard drive(s).
** Ensure that you have available disk space - maybe you are running low - this can lead to all kinds of strange problems.
** Try to split up the system's paging file among its physical drives (if you have more than one drive on the system). Also consider using a faster drive, or if you have lots of cash laying around, get a SAN.
** In BizTalk, is tracking enabled? If so, are you also tracking message bodies? Disable tacking or message body tracking and see if there is a difference.
** Start performance monitor and monitor the following counters when running your solution
Object: BizTalk Messaging
Instance: (select the receiving host) %%
Counter: Documents Received/Sec
Object: BizTalk Messaging
Instance: (select the transmitting host) %%
Counter: Documents Sent/Sec
Object: XLANG/s Orchestrations
Instance: (select the processing host) %%
Counter: Orchestrations Completed/Sec.
%% You may have only one host, so just use it. Since BizTalk configurations vary, I am using generic names for hosts.
The preceding counters monitor the most basic aspects of your server, but may help to narrow down places to look further. You can, of course, add CPU and Memory too. If you have time (days...maybe weeks) you could monitor for processes that allocate memory and never release it. Use the following counter...
Object: Memory
Counter: Pool Nonpaged Bytes
Slow decline of this counter indicates that a process is not releasing memory, which affects everything on the system.
Let us know how things turn out!
I had the same problem with, when my orchestration was idle for some time it took a long time to process the first msg. A article of EvYoung helped me solve this problem.
"This is caused by application domain unloading within the BizTalk host process. If an AppDomain is shutdown after idle, the next message that comes needs to wait for the Orchestration to compile again. Depending on the complexity of your design, this can be a noticeable wait. To prevent this in low latency requirement scenario, you can modify the BTSNTSVC.EXE.config file and set SecondsIdleBeforeShutdown property to -1. This will prevent AppDomain shutdown due to idle."
You can find the article in here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalkcpr/archive/2008/05/08/thoughts-on-orchestration-performance.aspx
It took me to long to respond but i thought i might help someone. cheers :)
Some good suggestions from others. I will add :
Do you have any custom receive pipeline components on the receive location ? If so perhaps one is leaking memory, calling some external component eg database which is taking a long time ?
How big are the files you are receiving ?
On the File transport properties of your receive location, set "file renaming" on, do the files get renamed within 60s.

ASP.NET - Single large web request triggers System.OutOfMemoryException - Still have plenty of available memory

Environment:
Windows 2003 Server (32 bit); IIS6, ASP.NET 2.0 (3.5); 4Gb Ram; 1 Worker Process
We have a situation where we have a very large System.XmlDocument is being loaded into memory, and then it heads into a complied XSL transform.
What is happening is when a web request comes in the server is sitting in an idle state with 2500Mb of available system memory.
As the XML DOM is populated, the available memory drops approx 500Mb at which point we get a System.OutOfMemoryException event. At this point the system should theoretically still have 2000Mb of available memory available to service the request (according to Perfmon).
The related questions I have are:
1) At what level in the stack is this out of memory limitation being met? OS? IIS? ASP.NET? worker process? Is this a per individual web request limit?
2) Is this limit configurable somewhere?
3) Why can’t this web request access the full available system memory?
1) I would guess at the worker process but this should be configurable within IIS to the limit of memory that a worker process can use. Another factor is what level of bits does your software use, e.g. 32 bit has a physical limit of 4 GB since this is the total address space.
2) Probably but don't forget that memory fragmentation may play a role in getting to out of memory faster than you think, e.g. if there is a memory request for a contiguous 1000 Mb piece of memory then this may not necessarily be found in the current memory.
3) Have you examined dump data to see what is in the memory when the exception gets thrown? If not, there are ways to get a snapshot of the memory to see what it looks like as this may give you more clues about what is going on.
You are running in a process. A process can only access 2 gigs of memory. This task is sharing memory with everything else running in this process, so this bit of code does not get the full 2 gig -- even if it is available.
There is a 3 gig switch on the os as well. I believe it is a registry setting. But you will have to search MSDN to find that info.
But realistically, you need to do this another way. Possibly by switching to a SAX style xml parser.
I'm sure there are some bright heads here that can answer your specific questions, but have you asked yourself if there is another way to do what you want? I specifically mean that you probably do not want to process a very large XML document, but you probably more specifically want to return something back to the client. Could you rewrite the code to avoid this XML document altogether, or perhaps not load it all into memory at the same time, and still produce the same end-result?
1) Dunno. Check your logs.
2) IIS limits memory divvied out to websites/application pools. Check your settings.
3) Servers are all about uptime; if an single app hogs all the resources everybody else suffers. Thats why enterprise apps like IIS limit memory to prevent runaways from taking down the entire server.

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