I am looking for ways to keep track of simultaneous users within an application. I cannot use IIS logs due to a load balancer that abstracts the users IP address. I am looking for a .NET code based solution or a configuration item, possibly with health monitoring to be able to track the "true" simultaneous user count.
I know that I can monitor the number of sessions, but that isn't really an ideal method to show, as it can be bloated based on the number of sessions with users abandoning their session.
There is a similiar question here: Tools and methods for live-monitoring ASP.NET web applications?
I found an advanced logging tool for debugging and monitoring .NET applications: SmartInspect. But I don't know if it meets your requirements.
What do you mean of "simultaneous users"? Perhaps you should monitor simultaneous TCP connections to your IIS application? Windows Performance Monitor tools should help you there.
Otherwise there is no sure way of telling how many users are using your application right now. If you can monitor number of sessions, then I'd suggest going with that. Just take into account the last modification time of the sessions, so you could get something like "active sessions in the last minute". That should give you a close measurment.
In the end we decided to use ASP.NET Performance counters, as well as generic information from the IIS Logs.
I parsed the information from both sources using the Microsoft Log Parser tool!
You just want to know the number of active users at a particular time? An easy option that omits inactive users as well as most bots would be to register the user as active through a JavaScript AJAX call on page load along with their SessionID. You can then purge old records from the log as you see fit. *Be careful of how you build your table's performance for read/write optimizations. ... just an idea off the top of my head.
We are using an expensive solution which is AVICode but it is great. You can monitor so many thing with that.
Related
I build ASP.NET websites (hosted under IIS 6 usually, often with SQL Server backends and forms authentication).
Clients sometimes ask if I can check whether there are people currently browsing (and/or whether there are users currently logged in to) their website at a given moment, usually so the can safely do a deployment (they want a hotfix, for example).
I know the web is basically stateless so I can't be sure whether someone has closed the browser window, but I imagine there'd be some count of not-yet-timed-out sessions or something, and surely logged-in-users...
Is there a standard and/or easy way to check this?
Jakob's answer is correct but does rely on installing and configuring the Membership features.
A crude but simple way of tracking users online would be to store a counter in the Application object. This counter could be incremented/decremented upon their sessions starting and ending. There's an example of this on the MSDN website:
Session-State Events (MSDN Library)
Because the default Session Timeout is 20 minutes the accuracy of this method isn't guaranteed (but then that applies to any web application due to the stateless and disconnected nature of HTTP).
I know this is a pretty old question, but I figured I'd chime in. Why not use Google Analytics and view their real time dashboard? It will require minor code modifications (i.e. a single script import) and will do everything you're looking for...
You may be looking for the Membership.GetNumberOfUsersOnline method, although I'm not sure how reliable it is.
Sessions, suggested by other users, are a basic way of doing things, but are not too reliable. They can also work well in some circumstances, but not in others.
For example, if users are downloading large files or watching videos or listening to the podcasts, they may stay on the same page for hours (unless the requests to the binary data are tracked by ASP.NET too), but are still using your website.
Thus, my suggestion is to use the server logs to detect if the website is currently used by many people. It gives you the ability to:
See what sort of requests are done. It's quite easy to detect humans and crawlers, and with some experience, it's also possible to see if the human is currently doing something critical (such as writing a comment on a website, editing a document, or typing her credit card number and ordering something) or not (such as browsing).
See who is doing those requests. For example, if Google is crawling your website, it is a very bad idea to go offline, unless the search rating doesn't matter for you. On the other hand, if a bot is trying for two hours to crack your website by doing requests to different pages, you can go offline for sure.
Note: if a website has some critical areas (for example, writing this long answer, I would be angry if Stack Overflow goes offline in a few seconds just before I submit my answer), you can also send regular AJAX requests to the server while the user stays on the page. Of course, you must be careful when implementing such feature, and take in account that it will increase the bandwidth used, and will not work if the user has JavaScript disabled).
You can run command netstat and see how many active connection exist to your website ports.
Default port for http is *:80.
Default port for https is *:443.
I have been looking for a solution to allow us to monitor our web servers performance counters over an asp.net website.
Is there an existing tool that I can make use of to accomplish this or will I need to roll my own?
The only solution I have found online is the use of perfmon to connect to the remote server, this I need to avoid.
The only criteria we need is the ability to select or configure what counter are used and a web interface to few these counters at a later date. We need a historical record or the servers performance.
We are using asp.net websites on IIS.
Thanks
Using perfmon remotely is the standard way to monitor performance counters remotely. This is done by sys admins across the globe.
Why do you need to avoid this?
However, your will need to roll out your own. I had done this in the past (users who could not figure out perfmon...).
In terms of historical data - you will need to poll the performance counters yourself and record the data somehow (database, flatfiles etc).
You can also setup a website to display current values, control and configure performance counters - the accounts the site runs under will required sufficient permissions, however.
When an asp.net website has about 1,000 active users, it works good.
How should I do if the website has about 100,000 active users?
How to upgrade my asp.net app to support a larger number of users?
Changing the webApp's architecture?
Or buying more web servers?
I just wonder in the real-world, how do other people build an asp.net website supporting millions of users? What's the app architecture of a website to support that?
Any suggestion will be welcome.
First, make sure you're with a first rate hosting provider.
Second, download a performance profiler (I always suggest Red Gate Performance Profiler) and profile your app. Find the bottlenecks and eliminate them. Repeat until you get your desired performance metric.
If your application is querying a database or other web services, try to use asynchronous methods. Using asynch methods will free up the web server to handle a lot more client requests while it is waiting for a response from the database server or web service.
You say it "works good" at the moment. It's impossible to know what the point at which this may change will be wihtout knowing a whole lot more about the nature of your traffic, current set up, what else runs on the server, etc ,etc. It could be that it continues to "work good" with a million users as it is.
When you need to make changes (and slowly reducing performance will alert you), that's whne you need to worry. And then, as Justin says, knowing the potential bottelnecks will give you pointers as to what solution you need.
Buying more servers is one strategy. So is changing the architecture. The easiest and cost effective is throwing more servers at it. It does depend a little bit on the current application architecture, but nothing that can't be easily overcome.
What I suggest, is to load test your application. See what happens as you increase the active users. Who knows it might handle 100k active users, maybe it won't but at least you will know the tipping point.
In regards to what you should do, that really depends on your business needs. If your company has the $$ and this is a core product, then it makes sense to architect a robust application. If it's not, maybe throwing hardware at the problem is good enough.
It would also help if you could define an active user. Is it someone who is visiting your site and has a session? Is it 100k concurrent requests to the server...?
In terms of hardware scaling: Scaling Up or Scaling out
Software scaling - Profile your app
I'm running several ASP.NET web sites with InProc session state and I would like to retrieve the number of active sessions per web site and hopefully any details around each session (eg client connection details).
My end goal is to be able to see who is connected to the web site so that I can notify them when deploying an update.
Is there any way to do this in .NET without resorting to SQL session state? I looked at Microsoft.Web.Administration but couldn't find a way to do it. And the "Sessions Active" performance counter in perfmon just gives the total sessions for the whole server (as well as not giving any metadata about the sessions).
EDIT: In my tests with performance counters I tested with total Sessions Active when I should have tested with the instance of Sessions Active for my web site. This gets me a little closer but I'd still like to actually retrieve the session information for the web site if possible.
Session is a concept, not an actuality. You can use the asp.net global.asax pseudo events for session start/end to track this concept but it will still only be an approximation. I think your best bet is to flip on your "maintenance in progress" flag and put something in the request pipeline that handles it for all incoming requests.
Not sure how/what you would do with this but I think you're going to be rolling some custom code here.
I am looking into different ways to handle updating an ASP.NET application across many different clients, and looking for suggestions from your previous experience.
We need the client apps to check if they have any available updates.
A way to Auto update (If possible, something similar to chromes but for webapp).
Some way to check that we are the ones sending the updates. (Checksum of some sort I would guess)
Any other tips/advice
Thanks
Edit: after thinking more about this overnight, I would have to agree that auto updates may not be the best. However maybe something more along the lines of how wordpress does it. Wordpress will display saying that there is an update available then clicking will auto update the system.
I would absolutely not have your application auto update on clients (assuming you mean clients are entities external to your organization) servers. We would immediately stop using a product that would "phone home" and update itself. Clients need to be able to choose when and how an update on their server occurs.
If you are going to do this, the easiest way would be to set up URI the systems could ping once a day etc. and see if there are updates available. If so the application would pull it down from the host system and update itself. If you do it using SSL then the certificate would verify the URI being hit is your company.
Having a hard time figuring out if you're actually talking about a web application or a desktop application. If you're trying to do something similar to Chrome...I'm guessing a desktop application. If that's the case...check out ClickOnce deployment.
It offers the first three bullet points you mention:
Every time a person runs the app, it will check for updates.
If updates are found, the user can choose to install them or not (better user experience than forcing the update on the user).
The application always checks the URL that the app was installed from...which in your case would be your servers.