Instrumenting .NET applications with AppDynamics using NuGet

January 14 2014
 


Application Performance Monitoring

Introduction

One of the coolest things to come out of the .NET stable at AppD this week was the NuGet package for Azure Cloud Services. NuGet makes it a breeze to deploy our .NET agent along with your web and worker roles from inside Visual Studio. For those unfamiliar with NuGet, more information can be found here.

Our NuGet package ensures that the .NET agent is deployed at the same time when the role is published to the cloud. After adding it to the project you’ll never have to worry about deploying the agent when you swap your hosting environment from staging to production in Azure or when Azure changes the machine from under your instance. For the remainder of the post I’ll use a web role to demonstrate how to quickly install our NuGet package, changes it makes to your solution and how to edit the configuration by hand if needed. Even though I’ll use a web role, things work exactly the same way for a worker role.

Installation

So, without further ado, let’s take a look at how to quickly instrument .NET code in Azure using AppD’s NuGet package for Windows Azure Cloud Services. NuGet packages can be added via the command line or the GUI. In order to use the command line, we need to bring up the package manager console in Visual Studio as shown below

PackageManager

In the console, type ‘install-package AppDynamics.WindowsAzure.CloudServices’ to install the package. This will bring up the following UI where you can enter the information needed by the agent to talk to the controller and upload metrics. You should have received this information in the welcome email from AppDynamics.

Azure

The ‘Application Name’ is the name of the application in the controller under which the metrics reported by this agent will be stored. When ‘Test Connection’ is checked we will check the information entered by trying to connect to the controller. An error message will be displayed if the test connection is unsuccessful. That’s it, enter the information, click apply and we’re done. Easy Peasy. No more adding files one by one or modifying scripts by hand. Once deployed, instances of this web role will start reporting metrics as soon as they experience any traffic. Oh, and by the way, if you prefer to use a GUI instead of typing commands on the console, the same thing can be done by right-clicking on the solution in Visual Studio and choosing ‘Manage NuGet Package’.

Anatomy of the package

If you look closely at the solution explorer you’ll notice that a new folder called ‘AppDynamics’ has been created in the solution explorer. On expanding the folder you’ll find the following two files:

  • Installer of the latest and greatest .NET agent.
  • Startup.cmd
The startup script makes sure that the agent gets installed as a part of the deployment process on Azure. Other than adding these files we also change the ServiceDefinition.csdef file to add a startup task as shown below.

Screen Shot 2013-11-27 at 8.11.27 PM

In case, you need to change the controller information you entered in the GUI while installing the package, it can be done by editing the startup section of the csdef file shown above. Application name, controller URL, port, account key etc. can all be changed. On re-deploying the role to Azure, these new values will come into effect.

Next Steps

Microsoft Developer Evangelist, Bruno Terkaly blogged about monitoring the performance of multi-tiered Windows Azure based web applications. Find out more on Microsoft Developer Network.

Find out more in our step-by-step guide on instrumenting .NET applications using AppDynamics Pro. Take five minutes to get complete visibility into the performance of your production applications with AppDynamics Pro today.

As always, please feel free to comment if you think I have missed something or if you have a request for content in an upcoming post.

Dustin Whittle
Dustin Whittle is a Developer Evangelist at AppDynamics where he focuses on helping organizations manage application performance. Find out more at dustinwhittle.com.

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