There are many technical articles/blogs on the web that jump straight into areas of .NET code you can instantly optimize and tune. Before we get to some of those areas, it’s good to take a step back and ask yourself, “Why am I here?” Are you interested in tuning your app, which is slow and keeps breaking, or are you looking to prevent these things from happening in the future? When you start down the path of Application Performance Management (APM), it is worth asking yourself another important question – what is success? This is especially important if you’re looking to tune or optimize your application. Knowing when to stop is as important as knowing when to start.

A single code or configuration change can have a dramatic impact on your application’s performance. It’s therefore important that you only change or tune what you need to – less is often more when it comes to improving application performance. I’ve been working with customers in APM for over a decade and it always amazes me how dev teams will browse through packages of code and rewrite several classes/methods at the same time with no real evidence that what they are changing will actually make an impact. For me, I learned the most about writing efficient code in code reviews with peers, despite how humbling it was. What I lacked the most as a developer, though, was visibility into how my code actually ran in a live production environment. Tuning in development and test is not enough if the application still runs slow in production. When manufacturers design and build cars they don’t just rely on simulation tests – they actually monitor their cars in the real world. They drive them for hundreds of thousands of miles to see how their cars will cope in all conditions they’ll encounter. It should be the same with application performance. You can’t simulate every use case or condition in dev and test, so you must understand your application performance in the real world.

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.NET Application Performance, .NET Best Practise, .NET Exceptions, .NET Performance, .NET SQL Statements, .NET Topology, apm, Application Performance Management, Azure Monitoring, IIS Monitoring

It’s official: AppDynamics support for Microsoft .NET and Windows Azure is finally here! We’ve got the same Kick Ass Product with the same Secret Sauce–but now it sports a shiny new CLR agent. So whether your apps are Java,  .NET or hybrid, with AppDynamics you have the best of both worlds when it comes to managing application performance.

We thought it was only fair to share our secret sauce and love with the Microsoft community, given that 40,000+ users of the Java community have been enjoying it for over 18 months. Our mission is to simplify the way organizations manage their agile, complex, and distributed applications. For .NET, this means that AppDynamics supports the latest and greatest technologies from Microsoft, including their new PaaS platform Windows Azure.

So, what does this mean for organizations with .NET or Azure apps? Let me summarize:

#1 You get to visualize in real-time what your .NET application actually looks like, along with its health and performance across any distributed production environment. It’s the 50,000 foot view that shows how your application and your business performs in your data center or Windows Azure.

#2 Ability to track all business transactions that flow through your .NET application. This gives you insight into business activity, health, and impact in the event that a slowdown or problem occurs in your production environment. This unique context and visibility helps you troubleshoot through the eyes of the business, so you can see their pain instantly in production and resolve it in minutes. We auto-discover and map every business transaction automatically–so don’t worry about configuration. We’ve got that taken care of.

#3 Deep diagnostic information on how your business transactions actually execute through your CLRs and/or JVMs (if you’ve got a hybrid app). This means complete call stacks of code execution with latency breakdowns across all your namespaces, classes and methods, which your business transactions invoke. You get maximum visibility in production with zero configuration, allowing you to perform root cause analysis in minutes.

#4 Ability to plot, correlate, and trend any CLR or OS metric over time–whether it’s logic thread counts, garbage collection time, or simply how much CPU your application CLR is burning. We let you report and analyze all this so you understand your CLR run-time and OS system resource.

Don’t believe us? Sign up for our free 30-day trial and we’ll provision you a SaaS login. You can then download and install our lightweight agents and see for yourself just how easy it can be!

As well as our .NET support, we’ve also crammed in some great innovation into the 3.3 release.

Real-Time JVM MBean Viewer:

In addition to trending standard JMX metrics from the JVM, users can now discover and trend any MBean attributes on the fly for short term analysis in real-time. Our new UI dialogue allows the user to browse through hundreds of available metrics which are automatically discovered and reported at the touch of a button. If the user wishes to convert any MBean attribute into a standard JMX metric they can just click “Create Metric” and AppDynamics will collect and report that metric as standard in the JMX Metrics viewer.

Search Business Transactions by their content/payload:

For example, you might have launched a new product on your application or website and need to understand its performance by looking at all business transactions that interact with that product. With AppDynamics v3.3 users can now search business transactions by any transaction payload. For example, the below screenshot shows how a user can search for all business transactions that relate to the book “Harry Potter”.

Additional Platform Support:

• Auto-discovery and mapping of LDAP, SAP and JavaMail tiers to business transaction flows for increased visibility.
• MongoDB support allowing users to see BSON queries and associated latency for calls made from Java applications.
• Enhanced support for WebSphere on Z/OS with automatic JVM naming pools to help customers identify and manage short-living and dynamic JVM run-times.

.NET, .NET Application Performance, ADO.NET, apm, Application Performance Management, ASP.NET, ASP.NET Monitoring, Azure Monitoring, MongoDB, WCF Monitoring, Windows Azure

When we launched AppDynamics Pro back in October 2009, it redefined the way organizations could monitor and manage the performance of their production Java applications. The feedback we’ve received to date can be summed up as “Simple, Smart, Powerful and easy to use.” Over the last decade, words like “simple” and “smart” were rarely associated with Application Performance Management (APM) solutions. Why? Because APM solutions were only as good as the users that configured them. For most organizations it was a full-time job just to keep their APM instrumentation, metrics, thresholds and alerts up-to-date so they could safely run in production, albeit with limited visibility because of overhead concerns.

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.NET, .NET Applications, .NET Monitoring, apm, Application Performance Management, CLR, IIS, IIS Monitoring