AppFabric Blog

While Windows Server AppFabric is a great addition to your server to production management monitoring and troubleshooting you might be interested to learn that it can also be very useful at development time.

The emails are rolling in…  Usually they say something like this.

AppFabric has this great new Dashboard that gives you insight into what is happening with your services and workflows. In this video, Senior Programming Writer Michael McKeown shows you what the Dashboard can do for you.

Windows Server AppFabric has this great new Dashboard that gives you insight into what is happening with your services and workflows. In this video, Senior Programming Writer Michael McKeown shows you what the Dashboard can do for you.

A long time ago, applications running on Windows Server were simply EXEs, where developers wrote a lot of custom code on top of the Operating System (OS) to interact with clients and other applications over the network. COM+ and Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) were added to make it easier to write and host server-side applications and Internet Information Server (IIS) was added to make it easier to write and host Web applications. Application logic was typically written in native code and/or in scripts (CGI, ASP) back then.

When VS 10 RC/.Net Framework 4 RC is installed, the previous version of VS 10 Beta2/.Net Framework 4 Beta2 is uninstalled. If you have Windows Server AppFabric Beta1 installed (Shows up as “Application Server Extensions for .NET4” on the machine that it has been installed), ideally you would uninstall AppFabric Beta1 before uninstalling VS 10 Beta2/.Net Framework 4 Beta2.

Read all about the new features here or just download it here.

In our previous post, we discussed the topic of Monitoring Applications using Windows Server AppFabric. In this post, we will show how to use the same tools in more advanced ways to troubleshoot problems in your applications.

Introduction

The previous post introduced the AppFabric Dashboard (pictured below). As you can see, it does a good job of giving you a quick view of the state of your WCF and WF services while highlighting potential problems. The AppFabric Dashboard is the starting point for many paths that you can take while troubleshooting. We’ll explore a few of the more common paths to get you familiar with the toolset.

Tracked Events

Most troubleshooting scenarios will require users to examine event data that was captured from the problematic service at the time the problem manifested itself. The dashboard provides several ways to drill down into the relevant event data quickly.

How to Drilldown

AppFabric provides a Tracked Events View that displays event data within IIS manager. This view lets users customize the query that is sent to the monitoring database using common filters. From the dashboard, you can use the Tracked Events Action to see the latest events that have been tracked, and then customize your query. Alternatively, you can click on any of the metrics displayed in the WCF Call History and WF Instance History sections, and a pre-created query will be used to save you time. For example, you could click the Exceptions metric and the resulting query would just show event data that contains exception information.

Using the Main Event List Pane

The main pane within the Tracked Events View displays a table of events that match the current query. The sortable columns in the table provide a high level summary of what the events mean. You can also right click rows in the table to get a context menu that provides useful tasks such as relating an event to a tracked Workflow instance. This is useful when you want to get events from an operation that spanned multiple services, maybe even different machines, as long as they are sharing the same monitoring database.

Using the Details Pane

When an event is selected in the main pane, the Details Pane at the bottom of the view displays information that was captured with the selected event. This includes custom event properties, environment information, tracked variables (for Workflow Services), and Error details (if applicable).

Using the Query Summary

As mentioned earlier, the query that is used to retrieve event data from the monitoring database can be customized. You would do this using the Query Summary control at the top of the Tracked Events View. Using this control, you can filter by several common criteria such as Emit Time, Event Type, End To End Activity Id, and Tracked Variables (Workflow only).

Monitoring Configuration

AppFabric provides a default monitoring configuration that is sufficient for common health monitoring and basic troubleshooting tasks. Sometimes, a more granular level of event data is required to troubleshoot a problem. AppFabric provides a UI tool that lets you modify the monitoring configuration that is stored in web.config files.

Changing the Monitoring Level

From any scope in the IIS hierarchy (Server, Web Site, Application), select the Configure action from within the .NET 4 WCF and WF Action section and then select the Monitoring tab. You can then choose from one of the 5 predefined monitoring levels.

· Off* – No event data is collected

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