I have recently deployed my web role to Windows Azure. In the properties of my WebRole I have set Enable Diagnostics.
I can also see that it correctly maps to a storage account once deployed by viewing the configuration file of the hosted service.
I have not setup anything else for diagnostics, I am unaware that I need to do anything else.
I am now setting up AzureWatch (by paraleap) to monitor my instances however it reports that WADPerformanceCountersTable does not exist.
I am very new to Azure, don't have a clue how the diganostics work and can't find anything on Google that shows me how. Could someone please show me the way.
Ok I figured it out and will leave this here for others to follow.
Step 1
If you follow http://dunnry.com/blog/2012/02/27/SettingUpDiagnosticsMonitoringInWindowsAzure.aspx Windows Azure Diagnostics will start saving data into your attached Blob storage, full of diagnostic information.
Special Note: These count towards your storage transaction, which is why you will see them go up.
Step 2
However I needed the WADPerformanceCounterTable, which should have been located in the tables section of the storage account but it never was created. I needed this to use services like AzureWatch to monitor and spin up or down instances.
Special Note: This is performance counters, a specific subset of diagnostic information and this isn't stored in the blob section by default.
Step 3
In your project you need to add which performance counters to monitor in the WebRole.cs.
Special Note: You won't have this if you just added an existing project to an Azure deployment project. Unless you specifically started the project from scratch and chose the Azure templates, you will need to create this manually. You would also need to add: Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics, Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime and Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient as References. Best way to see how it all works is to create a blank project from an Azure template and copy over the necessary items.
Step 4
Next you need to define which performance counters to monitor. As such here is a great sample: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazure/Windows-Azure-PerformanceCo-7d80ebf9
Extra Reference
Microsoft also has a few steps you can follow here that might help out if things still aren't working: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh411521.aspx
Take a look at:
http://dunnry.com/blog/2012/02/27/SettingUpDiagnosticsMonitoringInWindowsAzure.aspx
There is also a lot of information on:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg433048.aspx
Related
The Issue
I am currently in the process of integrating a pre-rendering service for SEO optimization, however we use an Azure App Service Plan to scale up or down when necessary.
One of the steps for setting up the proper configuration requires placing an applicationHost.xdt file in the /site/ directory, which is one level above the /site/wwwroot directory where the application itself gets deployed to.
What steps should I take in order to have the applicationHost.xdt file persist to new instances spawned by the scaling process?
Steps I have taken to solve the issue
So far I have been Googling a lot, but haven't succeeded in finding a lot of documentation on using an applicationHost.xdt file in combination with an Azure App Service Plan.
I am able to upload the file to an instance manually, however I have assumed that when we then scale up to more instances the manually uploaded file will not be present on the new instance(s).
Etcetera
We are using Prerender.io as pre-rendering service.
Should there be an easier to set-up & similarly priced service available, we would be open to suggestions as we are in an exploratory phase regarding pre-rendering.
Suppose this won't be a problem, cause all files under azure app are shared between all your instances. You could check it in this Kudu wiki:Persisted files. And in my test all instances will keep the file.
About upload the applicationHost.xdt, you don't have to do it manually, there is a IIS Manager Site Extension to lets you very easily create XDT files. And it will provide some sample XDT's for you.
I have an ASP.Net MVC 4 application hosted on Windows Server 2008. I'm using Microsoft Application Insights, and it's working perfectly for client side metrics such as Client Processing Time, Custom Events, Users, Sessions, Page Views, etc. However, I cannot get any server-side metrics such as Processor Time or Available Memory. The areas are all covered by a banner that says something to the effect of "Learn how to collect server request data". When I click on the banner, it shows a blade with instructions, all of which I've already completed (the quick start).
In addition to installing the Application Insights SDK through VS 2013 (0.12.0-build17386), I've also installed and configured the Application Insights Status Monitor on the server. I've restarted IIS, and even restarted the server. Despite all this, I cannot get any server metrics. I've read the troubleshooting guide, and I've checked everything mentioned therein such as making sure the app pool identity is part of the "Performance Monitor Users" group.
I feel as though there is something I have to do to the ApplicationInsights.config file in order to either turn on and / or define the server metrics I want, but I simply cannot find any documentation on this.
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
No you shouldn't do anything additional with ApplicationInsights.config. Performance counters are the part of default monitoring package and almost all problems are related to that user is not the part of 'Performance Monitor Users' group, but it's not your case.
To be sure that config is correct you can check that the following module is defined in ApplicationInsights.config:
<Add Type="Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.Extensibility.PerfCollector.PerformanceCollectorModule, Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.Extensibility.PerfCollector"/>
Also do you see any notifications in the StatusMonitor and/or traces/exceptions in the Diagnostic search at the application insights resource overview blade?
Ok, we've got it. There was an ApplicationInsights.config in the root folder of the application, and that was the only one I've ever looked at. At Yulia Safarova's suggestion, I discovered another one inside the bin folder. This one did NOT have the module definition specified. (It was basically empty). I copied all the contents of the one from the root into the one in the bin folder, and all the data started to flow.
If you are looking for the server data like CPU, Memory, Response rate to be displayed on the Azure Application Insight, then along with the addition of above module, also make sure that the web application Identity user is part of the administrator group on the server. and below flag is turned on in web.config
"EnableAppInsightUsageCollection" value="true"
I've installed AI, included in project (VS2013 Update4), but some of the metrics (app heath & diagnostics) are not working.
If i click "Learn how to", the help is always the same... I folowed all the steps, that must be done, but it doesn't work.
What else do I need to do, to get all of the metrics work?
see attached image:
http://i57.tinypic.com/nv75sz.png
thx
peter
confirmed that if you deployed your app to an azure website that you will miss seeing some data in the Application Insights blade. the 2 data flows that won't work specifically include 1) the runtime instrumentation agent - this acts like a profiler and automatically discovers your code dependencies like calls to SQL, another HTTP endpoint, Azure storage account or azure blob and 2) Windows systems performance counters.
1) is something that is very close to being released as an Azure website extension http://www.siteextensions.net/ and will depend on the .12 Application Insight SDK (not released yet)
2) is something that we are still working on an ETA for
Other data visible in the application insights blade should already be working on an azure website. If you don't see your data make sure you are looking at the right application insights resource and double check the instrumentation key. Also make sure you have manually added the client side instrumentation script which isn't added by default when we add application insights to an existing project (ie. not a new project).
I am working on a ASP.net MVC4 project where a same project needs to be deployed to many clients on daily basis, each client will have its own domain / sub domain and a separate app pool and db (MSSSQL).
Doing each deployment manually could take at least 1-2 hours if everything goes well. Is there anyway using which I can do this in some automated way?
Moreover, we also need to update all of the apps when a new version is released.. may be one by one or all of them at same time. However, doing this manually could take weeks and once we have more clients then it will not possible doing this update manually.
The update involves, suspending app for some time, taking a full backup of files and db, update application code/ files in app folder, upgrade db with a script and then start app, doing some diagnosis script to check if update was successful or not, if not we need to check what went wrong?
How can we automate this updates? Any idea would be great on how to approach this issue.
As a developer for BuildMaster, I can say that this scenario, known as the "Core Version" pattern, is a common one. If you're OK with a paid solution, you can setup your deployment plans within the tool that do exactly what you described.
As a more concrete example, we experience this exact situation in a slightly different way. BuildMaster has a set of 60+ extensions that rely on a specific SDK version. In our recent 4.0 release, we had to re-deploy every extension because of breaking API changes within the SDK. This is essentially equivalent to having a bunch of customers and deploying to them all at once. We have set up our deployment plans such that any time we create a new release of the SDK application, we have the option to set a variable that says to build every extension that relies on the SDK:
In BuildMaster, the idea is to promote a build (i.e. an immutable object that travels through various environments like Dev, Test, Staging, Prod) to its final environment (where it becomes the deployed build for the release). In your case, this would be pushing your MVC application to its final environment, and that would then trigger the deployments of all dependent applications (i.e. your customers' instances of your application). For our SDK, the plan looks like this:
For your scenario, you would only need the single action, "Promote Build". As I mentioned before, any dependents would then be promoted to their final environments, so all your customer deployments would kick off once that action is run during deployment. As an example, our Azure extension's deployment plan for its final environment looks like this (internal URLs redacted):
You may have noticed that these plans are marked "Shared", which means every extension we have has the exact same deployment plan, but utilizes different variables to handle the minor differences like names, paths, etc.
Since this is such an enormous topic I could go on for ages, but I think that should be sufficient for your use-case if you wanted to try it out.
There are others but you could setup Team Server Foundation to deploy automated builds.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff650529.aspx
I find the easiest way to do this from an MVC project is to create a publish profile.
This is done by right-clicking your project selecting publish and then configuring it to your needs.
Then from TFS you create a new build definition, this kicks of a wizard which takes you through it.
There are quite a few options which would be too long to go into for every scenario.
The main change I usually find the most important is to set an MSBuild Argument to deploy with the publish profile.
This can be found at Process > Advanced > MSBuild Arguments.
Once this is configured correctly it's a simple case of right-clicking and queue new build to build and deploy.
You wil need different PublishProfile/Build configuration per deployment environment.
For backups I use a powershell script which can be called manually or from TFS.
You also have a drop folder in TFS which keeps a backup of x many releases.
The datbases are automatically configured via Sql server to backup, TBH I didn't set that up it was a DB admin guy who is also involved with releases.
From a dev testing side I use jMeter (http://jmeter.apache.org/) to run some automated scripts that check that users can login and view certain screens, just to confirm nothing major has gone wrong. However there is usually a testing team to run more detailed tests, again not setup by me.
All of the above will probably take you sometime to setup but in the long run it will literally save you weeks of time over a year.
A free alternative to TFS is http://www.cruisecontrolnet.org/, I have used this in the past too and is pretty good.
You can automate your .Net deployments with Beanstalk, which will give you a way to trigger deployments with a single click, watch progress, manage permissions and see history of deployments. Check out this guide on the topic:
http://guides.beanstalkapp.com/deployments/deploy-dotnet.html
I hope you will find it useful.
P.S. - I work at Beanstalk.
I'm tryign to use 51Degrees in a .NET project that I deploy to Azure. August 2011, they released v1.2.1.3 marked as "Azure Compatible":
Foundation can now be deployed on to the Windows Azure Cloud service.
See the release note for full details on requirements and how to
setup. Azure related changes include: Instead of a log file, log
entries are written to a log table Instead of a devices file, previous
device requests are written to a device table A new conditional
compilation symbol - 'AZURE'. AZURE enabled builds will not work in
traditional ASP.NET.
Since then there have been a dozen releases and they are up to v2.1.4.9. However, their documentaiton is super light on how to use it with Azure. In fact, there was a bug originally because v1.2.1.3 stated
To make use of the changes you must create a storage account called
‘fiftyonedegrees’. The foundation will then create two tables, one for
previous devices, and another for logs.
This isn't possible because Azure storage accounts need to be unique across all instances so everyone can't create ones named fifityonedegrees.
Their response was:
After rereading the blog it seems I've made an oversight in this
regard, and will update shortly.
The storage account that the Foundation looks for can be changed in
the Foundation source code. Go to Foundation/Properties/Constants.cs
and change the string 'AZURE_STORAGE_NAME' to the name of your storage
account.
However, I'm still at a loss at how to utilize it within my project. Here's my issues:
I'm not clear whether v1.2.1.3 is the only Azure compatible release, or every release after is Azure compatible. Their documentation doesn't say.
When I install 51Degrees via NuGet, my project doesn't get an App_Data folder created which contradicts their documentation. The web.config file even has entries in it that reference the App_Data folder such as <log logFile="~/App_Data/Log.txt" logLevel="Info"/>.
Based on the response to the Azure storage account bug I quoted earlier, they are sayign IN need to edit the file Foundation/Properties/Constants.cs. However, since I'm installing via NuGet and it's a DLL, NuGet is presumably the wrong approach? Do I need to download the source and compile it myself and wire it up to my project manually?
I'm generally new to .NET, NuGet, VS, etc so appreciate the help.
All versions are Azure compatible from 1.2.1.3 onwards. I'm assuming this is the blog post you were talking about. After you've created your azure storage account, you'll have to edit the Constants.cs file in the source code and add in your account name. It's my understanding that this means you'll have to get access to the source code and edit it directly. One you have done this you'll need to recompile for the software to work correctly. I'm not sure if there is a way to perform the same task using NuGet, but I'll look into it. Hope this helps.