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
Related
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.
We have a system running Windows Server 2008R2 x64 and SQL Server 2008R2 x64 with SSRS installed/configured. This is a shared reporting server used by a large number of people, with some fairly large inefficient databases (400-500gb of data ish), and these users use the system to generate ad-hoc reports based of a reporting model that sits on top of the aforementioned databases. Note that the users are using NTLM to logon and identify for running reports.
Most reports are quick, but if you are running a report for 1 or 2 years worth of data, they can take a while to return (5minutes ish). This is fine for most users, however some of the users are stuck behind a proxy, which has a connection timeout set at 2minutes. As SSRS 2008R2 does not seem to send back a "keep-alive" signal (confirmed via wireshark), when running one of these long reports the proxy server thinks the connection has died, and as such it just gives up and kills the connection. This gives the user a 401 or 503 error and obviously cancels the report (the incorrect error is a known bug in SSRS which Microsoft refuse to fix).
We're getting a lot of flak from the user's about this, even though it's not really our issue..so I am looking for a creative solution.
So far I have come up with:
1) Discovering some as yet unknown setting for SSRS that can make it keep the connection alive.
2) installing our own proxy in between the users and our reports server, which WILL send a keep-alive back (not sure this will work and it's a bit hacky, just thinking creatively!)
3) re-writing our reports databases to be more efficient (yes this is the best solution, but also incredibly expensive)
4) ask the experts :) :)
We have a call booked in with Microsoft Support to see if they can help - but can any experts on Stack help out? I appreciate that this may be a better question for server fault (and I may post it there) but it's a development question too really :)
Thanks!
A few things:
A. For SSRS overall on it's service:
I personally use a keep alive service as I believe the default recycle is 12 hours for SSRS server. I use a tool someone turned me onto called 'VisualCron' that can do many task processes automatically. You can also just make a call in a WCF service or similar to. Basically I know the first report from a user for the day is generally slow. Usually you need to hit http:// (servername)/ReportServer to keep it alive.
B. For cachine report level items:
If this does not help I would suggest possibly caching DataSets when possible. Some people have data that is up to the moment but for a lot of people that is not the case. You may create a shared dataset in SSRS and then cache that on a schedule. So if you have domain like tables that only need to be updated once in a blue moon put them there. Same with data that is nightly or in batches. If you are transactional based shop that is up to the moment this may not help but for batch based businesses this can help tremendously.
You can also cache the reports for their data as a continuation of this. Under 'Manage' drop down for a report when in the /Reports landing page you can set the data to run under a specific schedule. You can also set a snapshot which is an extension of this as it executes with some default parameters set on a schedule and is a copy of the report when it was ran.
You are mentioning ASP.NET so I am not certain how much some of this will work if you are doing this all through a site you are setting up internally as a pass through. But you could email or save files on a schedule as well through SSRS's subscription service.
C. Change how you store your data for reporting.
You can create a Report Warehouse of select item level values of queries. Create a small database that is just a few recent years of data and only certain fields and certain tables. Then index it to death and report off of that. In my experience this method will fly in terms of performance but it does take the extra overhead of setting it up. Generally most companies will whine about this but it often takes a single day to set up and then you create one SSMS job that does it all nightly or an SSIS package then you don't worry about it. I like this method as I know my data is not being reported off of production and is isolated personally.
I am just getting in to the more intricate parts of web development. This may not be in the best place. However, when is it best to get load balancing for a web project? I understand that it depends on good design/bad design as to how many users you can get to visit a site without it REALLY effecting the performance. However, I am planning to code a new project that could potentially have a lot of users and I wondered if I should be thinking off the bat about load balancing. Opinions welcome; thanks in advance!
I should not also that the project most likely will be asp.net (webforms or mvc not yet decided) with backend of mongodb or pgsql(again still deciding).
Load balancing can also be a form of high availability. What if your web server goes down? It can take a long time to replace it.
Generally, when you need to think about throughput you are already rich because you have an enormous amount of users.
Stackoverflow is serving 10m unique users a month with a few servers (6 or so). Think about how many requests per day you had if you were constantly generating 10 HTTP responses per second for 8 hot hours: 10*3600*8=288000 page impressions per day. You won't have that many users soon.
And if you do, you optimize your app to 20 requests per second and CPU core which means you get 80 requests per second on a commodity server. That is a lot.
Adding a load balancer later is usually easy. LBs can tag each user with a cookie so they get pinned to one particular target. You app will not notice the difference. Usually.
Is this for an e-commerce site? If so, then the real question to ask is "for every hour that the site is down, how much money are you losing?" If that number is substantial, then I would make load balancing a priority.
One of the more-important architecture decisions that I have seen affect this, is the use of session variables. You need to be able to provide a seamless experience if your user ends-up on different servers during their visit. Session variables won't transfer from server to server, so I would avoid using them.
I support a solution like this at work. We run four (used to be eight) .NET e-commerce websites on three Windows 2k8 servers (backed by two primary/secondary SQL Server 2008 databases), taking somewhere around 1300 (combined) orders per day. Each site is load-balanced, and kept "in the farm" by a keep-alive. The nice thing about this, is that we can take one server down for maintenance without the users really noticing anything. When we bring it back, we re-enable our replication service and our changes get pushed out to the other two servers fairly quickly.
So yes, I would recommend giving a solution like that some thought.
The parameters here that may affect the one the other and slow down the performance are.
Bandwidth
Processing
Synchronize
Have to do with how many user you have, together with the media you won to serve.
So if you have to serve a lot of video/files to deliver, you need many servers to deliver it. Let say that you do not have, what is the next think that need to check, the users and the processing.
From my experience what is slow down the processing is the locking of the session. So one big step to speed up the processing is to make a total custom session handling and your page will no lock the one the other and you can handle with out issue too many users.
Now for next step let say that you have a database that keep all the data, to gain from a load balance and many computers the trick is to make local cache of what you going to show.
So the idea is to actually avoid too much locking that make the users wait the one the other, and the second idea is to have a local cache on each different computer that is made dynamic from the main database data.
ref:
Web app blocked while processing another web app on sharing same session
Replacing ASP.Net's session entirely
call aspx page to return an image randomly slow
Always online
One more parameter is that you can make a solution that can handle the case of one server for all, and all for one :) style, where you can actually use more servers for backup reason. So if one server go off for any reason (eg for update and restart), the the rest can still work and serve.
As you said, it depends if/when load balancing should be introduced. It depends on performance and how many users you want to serve. LB also improves reliability of your app - it will not stop when one system goes crashing down. If you can see your project growing to be really big and serve lots of users I would sugest to design your application to be able to be upgraded to LB, so do not do anything non-standard. Try to steer away of home-made solutions and always follow good practice. If later on you really need LB it should not be required to change your app.
UPDATE
You may need to think ahead but not at a cost of complicating your application too much. Do not go paranoid and prepare everything to work lightning fast 'just in case'. For example, do not worry about sessions - session management can be easily moved to SQL Server at any time and this is the way to go with LB. Caching will also help if you hit some bottlenecks in the future but you do not need to implement it straight away - good design (stable interfaces), separation and decoupling will allow for the cache to be added later on. So again - stick to good practices, do not close doors but also do not open all of them straight away.
You may find this article interesting.
I've written a ASP.NET app that I hope to sell to businesses, I could host the trial but it's designed to connect to the customers data so customers will certainly want to install it to do a successful evaluation.
I've never produced anything commercial before so I'm looking for advice on how best to limit the trial, a 30 day trial seems most common, do you simply rely on the clock of the PC/Server they install it on? Any other suggestions welcome, please keep in mind this is ASP.NET app so will be installed on their web server.
Thanks
Craig
I would just do it via the PC's clock. At the end of the day, they could just change the clock and continue to use your software, though it's probably not going to work in practice (i.e. most software actually uses the date/time for other things as well and changing it going to screw that up).
Generally, you can usually trust business more than you trust the general public. The liability of a business is much higher than that of an individual, so if it came to it, you could potentially sue them for quite a bit. That alone means most businesses will purchase licenses for all of their software: a few hundred (or even thousand) dollars for a software license is much better than risk getting sued.
When they sign up for the demo, make sure you get all of their contact details and so on.
I would setup a web service on your server to authenticate the demo application. The web service should get called periodically and if it fails, then shut down the application. That way you have complete control over the trial (you can extend it or shut it down remotely).
You should give them some sort of key which they will place in your web.config that will identify them as a customer.
Make sure you take the usual precautions of encrypting / using hashes with both the key and the web service so it's not bypassed.
This sort of thing has been well covered on SO in the past.
You cannot make it unbreakable, but you can make it very difficult for the client to break your trial period.
One way to do it is to take the first run time and encrypt that info and store it either in your web.config or database. This has a weakness though: what do you do if the value is not present where you expect it to be?
Another option is to ping a webservice that you host. If the webservice says their trial is over then you can render the appropriate page to tell them that. This has the advantage that the webservice is beyond their control and cannot be messed with. It has the disadvantage that not every client will want to be allowing their web app to phone home, and there may be connectivity issues which would interfere with the functioning of your app.
So you might want to come up with a variety of options, and then implement a licencing module using the Provider pattern, so that you can swap in the licencing module most suitable for that client.
Put a counter in the web.config, of course give the counter a non-related name so the customer does not know what it is for. Every time they access the application you can increment the counter. Give them x number of log-in's.
If you want you can encrypt the counter if you do not want the customer to figure out that the counter is incrementing.
SQL Server profiler is great for profiling SQL Server performance for web apps. However, when I'm testing my webapp I'd like a summary of database hits/duration per page.
Does anybody know of any utilities for giving you this kind of information?
If you want duration per page, I'd recommand Google Analytics.
If you want a summary of database hits (ie, you run three procedures during one page load so you want to show a count of three) then I would recommend adding auditing code to your sprocs.
Alternately (though more expensively in terms of processing) you could turn on either SQL Profiler or SQL Trace and then track the database hits that way to perform statistical analysis on them.
I would recommend setting a data access routine that will be used for all the site.
This routine/class/or whatever you like could log in the database or in a log all the "hits", their duration, error (is any), timeout, etc.
If you program it properly, you will be able to know how many DB hit / page load, avg(DBHit) + you will get as a free bonus the "longest SProc, shortest, more often called".
The positive side of this is that you don't need to modify any stored proc and you can have a nice little "wrapper" around your access to the DB.
For the "Duration per page", if you go with google analysis you will not be able to merge the information back with what you got on the database server. So I would recommend logging each access to a page in the DB.
Then you can infer that Page1.StartTime = getdate(), Page1.EndTime = (page2.Starttime-1 or session.log_off_time) for example. [This is a little basic but according to your environment you can improve it].