9 Powerful Tools for Debugging and Monitoring ASP.NET Applications

Monitoring and debugging are vital factors for successful application development.

ASP.NET is an open-source framework based on .NET. The developers use ASP.NET to build websites, applications, and services using CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. They even write web APIs that allow JSON or XML to communicate with connected devices, including mobile devices.

ASP.NET functionality can be enhanced with the SignalR library. SignalR uses the HTML5-based WebSockets API and other APIs to easily establish dynamic multi-way communication between server and client.

Microsoft also offers other frameworks to enhance further the functionality of ASP.NET, including dynamic data, data application frameworks, AJAX functionality, and an MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework for building web applications.

Need to debug the ASP.NET application

In the design and development process or the program development life cycle (PDLC), errors are bound to occur. It is essential to find and correct these errors early to minimize person-hours and avoid major development bottlenecks later on.

The process of finding and correcting logical and syntactic errors in a PDLC is called debugging.

The debugging process is where the programmer or developer adds breakpoints to an ASP.NET application. This breakpoint is used to stop the execution of a running program to check the correctness of the program step by step. It helps developers analyze the code sections before finalizing or fixing the code.

ASP.NET application monitoring needs

ASP.NET application monitoring activities ensure that applications work according to defined indicators, and if difficulties or errors arise, developers should get to know each other immediately before the user experience.

Monitoring events are critical to maintain the application’s runtime and fix it in time in case of failure. There are several reasons to monitor ASP.NET applications, such as:

• To check the availability and usage of the site
• The application throws an exception every time the page loads
• The application is working fine, but invoices or processes on the backend are not running
• The application can run other processes, which can consume resources and slow down the main process

It is essential for SMB (small to medium business) and large enterprises to monitor ASP.NET application response, online availability, customer response, backend process, etc., to ensure the best end-user experience and ensure better business results.

At the very least, the company needs to know if the application is online and how it works at a high level. Is the site fast or slow? Are customers satisfied? This is a critical question that you must answer and monitor at all times.

In the following sub-section, we will discuss tools used to debug and monitor ASP.NET applications.

New Relic

New Relic provides visibility of the .NET Framework and the .NET core and other languages ​​and components besides Microsoft. The software helps identify bottlenecks in applications and services and fix them before customer experiences.

It is adaptable software that monitors applications running in data centers in the cloud, and web services from Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Elastic Cloud from Amazon, and others.

Its dynamic program analysis diagnoses and solves problems in the production phase. Its exception warning mechanism helps fix issues before users are affected.

Overall, New Relic is a complete package to showcase the entire ASP.net framework in terms of real-time monitoring, operational tracking, alerts, diagnosis, and troubleshooting in applications.

Features

• Performance comparison before and after code implementation
• Service map visualization for distributed applications and service dependencies
• Centralized dashboard to monitor all running applications and health monitoring
• Collect real-time data to get an idea of ​​app performance

The transparency, predictability, and affordability of this software are significant benefits for small and medium-sized businesses. It is free for one user to use its basic features. Its price starts at $99 per extra user and additional features.

ManageEngine

The Application monitoring of ManageEngine is awarded as Magic quadrant by Gartner nine times. It provides in-depth insight into the performance of different types of web applications and the key user experiences of your business applications to identify and fix problems before end-users are affected.

From encoding sequences to Unified Resource Locator (URL), the entire application stack can be monitored, tracked for performance issues and bugs fixed before major crashes occur.

Miniature performance metrics like page view time, download time, lock time, etc., can also be tracked from various places on the dashboard. Organizations of all sizes can use the software to track application runtime, monitor real-time performance, and resolve bottlenecks before user performance is impacted.

Features

• Track and monitor user actions for response times and errors
• Identify web transactions that lead to poor user experience and user satisfaction with Apdex results
• Use waterfall charts to identify slow loading components
• Record important web paths and play them back in minutes

In addition to the .NET framework, it can be used for various types of web applications, including Java, NodeJS, Ruby in Rails, and PHP. The software is available for free use for 30 days, after which prices for annual and perpetual licensed versions are available upon request.

Sentry

Sentry is one of the simplest and most widely used ASP.NET error and performance monitoring software for small to large businesses. It is used by 80,000 organizations worldwide, including Microsoft, Disney, Cloudfare, Reddit, Github, and others.

The entire application stack can be monitored, including file names and line numbers. All exceptions, including debug logs, network queries, database queries, past errors, can be filtered and grouped for analysis.

Its unique ability to create custom environment tags for exceptions helps categorize applications, business issues, and user errors. ASP.NET exception handling is based on specific parameters such as HTTP request, workflow stage, and hostname for each issue.

Features

• Distributed end-to-end tracking to spot incorrect and correct API calls
• Efficiently deal with bugs and fix ASP.NET errors by automatically sending emails to connected owners/teams
• Ability to merge duplicate bugs by version and find out if there is an impact on future versions

Its free version is available for developers for basic performance monitoring. Its price starts at $26 per month.

DotTrace

The DotTrace Profiler helps enterprises find performance bottlenecks in all types of .net applications, including desktop applications, Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Universal Platform services, ASP.NET applications hosted on IIS web servers, unit tests, Mono and Unity applications.

One of its uniqueness is that it allows instant profiling of any static method in the code, which helps to profile each piece of code immediately after coding. There is no need to build a solution, run it under a profiler, or run a deployment script that runs new code.

All SQL links can be tracked to identify slow SQL queries and performance statistics. This can be associated with running applications to investigate performance issues in a production environment.

Features

• Quickly analyze asynchronous code in one place.
• Allow remote profile applications without installation.
• Analyze slowly incoming HTTP requests to determine the exact cause
• Estimated performance improvement by recalculated time of all functions in a snapshot based on time adjustment

DotTrace offers a dedicated TeamCity plugin that can be used to profile CI server integration tests and prevent performance degradation. The Dot trace software is part of the dotUltimate software package, including six additional tools. DotUltimate costs $399 for one user for the first year.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace is a complete .NET package for monitoring browser applications, IIS, databases, services, and activity. It uses proprietary PurePath Technology to capture time and context code levels for each transaction at every level without gaps or blind spots in .NET application environments.

Pre-configured dashboards monitor all real-time performance metrics, including individual transactions, SQL statements, code levels, and more. It shows various error tracking metrics like garbage collection, web request size, active and idle threads, .NET memory, restarts, error rate, bandwidth, etc.

Features

• Performance metrics such as CPU and memory usage, network traffic, TCP retransmissions can be observed.
• Its reverse tracing capabilities help understand the impact of database expressions on user experience.
• Automatically identify and map all applications and business transaction flows in .NET applications.
• Web server performance metrics such as processes, traffic, and queries can be tracked.

The cost of full-stack monitoring software is $69. If you are looking for a specific module, they have a different price structure.

AppDynamics

The AppDynamics platform was taken over by world-renowned networking company Cisco. This software provides a complete solution for monitoring and managing the performance of .NET applications.

It has the most scalable design in the industry. It supports almost all .NET monitoring frameworks, including ADO, ASP, IIS, Asynchronous Monitoring, Standalone Applications, Windows Services, Azure, Sharepoint Servers, Remote Services, MVC5, and many more.

It has a dedicated Business Transaction Management Board, which monitors and tracks the full efficiency of business transactions in terms of transaction status, important statistics like calls per minute, slow transactions, and much more.

It shows detailed metrics such as the ASP.NET transaction recovery code execution time.

Features

• Automatic snapshots of slow or pending transactions for quick analysis and troubleshooting with ASP.NET
• Graphical representation of performance statistics
• Its quick assembly mechanism allows for fast deployment

The software comes with a 15-day test phase. The pricing structure is based on CPU cores and starts at $6 per month for the Infrastructure Monitoring Edition. It has three other editions: Premium ($60/m), Enterprise ($90/m), and Real-Time User Monitoring (0.06/m per 1000 tokens).

ANTS Performance Profiler

The ANTS Performance Profiler is designed to find performance issues in the .NET standard and .NET core and third-party frameworks, SQL queries, and more. It is used for desktop applications, ASP.NET applications, and ASP.NET Model-View-Controller.

This software provides complete ASP.NET performance data for .NET code and database queries. Its accurate diagnosis allows to drill down to slow lines to spot problems.

Its call tree structure identifies and directly displays expensive methods, DB queries, and web queries to troubleshoot slow activity. The Professional Edition supports two main databases – SQL and Oracle – to test how effectively .NET code queries the database.

Features

• Provides wide-ranging I/O performance when applications have disk activity
• Tracks outgoing HTTP requests to find out what caused the request
• Combine each row time with SQL query to find slow queries
• Monitor CPU-specific performance of .NET or ASP.NET applications so you can only focus on the data that matters

The trial period is 14 days. This software is available in 2 editions: Standard and Professional. Standard pricing starts at $545 per user.

Retrace

Stackify Retrace is an easy-to-use SaaS-based software monitoring ASP.NET and Java Applications. It provides complete end-to-end solutions, including application monitoring, transaction tracking, metrics logging, errors and reporting, and robust alerting.

Its in-house designed app “App score” provides granular details then Apdex score. The dashboard provides information on all the metrics you can use to closely monitor your application, including best web queries, SQL query performance, slow web queries, and more.

Its web platform shows server and application performance in terms of CPU and memory usage, signals related to critical transactions per minute, errors per minute, satisfaction scores, and much more.

Features

• Automate deployment tracking with any Continuous integration/continuous delivery(CI/CD) tool
• Ability to quickly identify changes in performance or error rate
• Can recognize how long web request processing code takes
• Fix bugs quickly and recognize ways to optimize your code

This software is available for free for 14 days. Costs start at $10/month for pre-production and or $25/month for production.

MiniProfiler

MiniProfiler is an open-source platform for .NET, ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core, and ASP.NET MVC and was created by members of the Stack Overflow team.

MiniProfiler helps debug and optimize the performance of each page by tracking how long it takes to process each part of the application and how much time is spent processing database requests.

The platform is used to find out which part of the application area is causing the lag so that the developer can look into the bottleneck and make the necessary correction and bring the application to the desired speed.

Its Best features include storage, call stack, and database profiles.

Conclusion

Creating a robust application is a complex activity that involves many person-hours to do complex coding, including HTML, CSS, and JS. Building an application involves mapping entities, various libraries, database connectivity, and server response time, and a lot more.

During this process, it becomes tough to understand the exact cause that is slowing down the application, so the tools and software mentioned above are helpful to make the process easier in terms of debugging, monitoring, and optimizing the performance of the application.

We hope this post helped you debug and optimize the performance of ASP.NET applications. You may also be interested in knowing about ASP.NET Hosting Platforms.