Stackify Releases Public Beta of APM Application Performance Monitoring Tool for ASP.NET Web Applications

Friday, May 1, 2015

Stackify’s beta release of its APM+ platform provides real-time application and server monitoring coupled with error & log management. It offers an application performance monitoring solution that combines code-level insights, error and log management, and server metrics into one consolidated platform to monitor for ASP.NET performance issues.

Stackify APM+ adds method-level code profiling of ASP.NET applications. For each request to a web app, the platform collects a lightweight call stack trace that gives insight into:

- Slow and low user satisfaction web requests

- The “hot path” in code and how to improve performance

- SQL Query performance and stats

- External web request performance

- Redis cache usage

APM+ offers support for async/await patterns, including async MVC controller methods. The integrated inline log & error data in the stack traces allows developers to see contextual log data alongside the captured call stack. All standard ASP.NET frameworks are supported including WebForms 2.0+, MVC v3+, WEB API and WCF.

Using the Stackify dashboard provides the ability to see where code is spending most of it’s time, such as in the database, waiting on an external request, queueing, etc. It provides insight into what the most expensive queries or web service calls are, how often they are called, and how long they take.

Drilling down into any request, developers see specific details such as the call stack and how many database connections/queries are made per request. Developers can look at a unique query, see what pages call that query, and any performance differences between those pages.

With key transactions that need to perform within certain limits, Stackify monitors can be set up for any profiled URL to track requests per minute, satisfaction score, HTTP error rate, and average response time. For SQL queries it can track average query time and queries per minute.

Stackify APM+ is built to be lightweight and not cause performance issues, even if running on high-volume, production servers. The platform only profile threads serving a web request and limits what it profiles to important events in the page lifecycle, and items known to directly impact overall performance (such as SQL,web service requests, etc).

While this first release specifically targets ASP.NET, as the platform continues to grow, support will be added for other popular programming languages.