Professional ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 Edition: In C# and VB

Chapter 35. Instrumentation

Many ASP.NET developers do more than just build an application and walk away. They definitely think about how the application will behave after it is deployed. Instrumentation is the task that developers undertake to measure and monitor their ASP.NET applications. Depending on the situation, some instrumentation operations occur at design time, whereas others are ongoing processes that begin at runtime.

ASP.NET 3.5 gives you greater capability to apply instrumentation techniques to your applications. You will find that the ASP.NET framework includes a large series of performance counters, the capability to work with the Windows Event Tracing system, possibilities for application tracing (covered in Chapter 24), and the most exciting part of this discussion — a health monitoring system that allows you to log a number of different events over an application's lifetime.

You can monitor a deployed application in several ways. First, you learn how to work with the Windows event log.

Working with the Event Log

When working with Visual Studio 2008, you can use the event log in the Server Explorer of the IDE in a couple of different ways. You can get to the event log section in the Server Explorer by expanding the view of the server you want to work with (by clicking the plus sign next to the server) until you see the Event Logs section. You also have the option to right-click the Event Logs node and select Launch Event Viewer from the list of available options. ...