Monitoring Application Performance Using Tools

Monitoring application performance is a general process in big organizations to continuously monitor and improve the application experience for their customers. This is an important factor that revolves around different tools and techniques to measure the application performance and make decisions quickly.

In this chapter, we will learn some key indicators that are recommended to monitor the .NET Core application as well as explore App Metrics to get the real-time analytics and telemetry information about the key indicators.

In this chapter, we will look at the following topics:

• Key metrics to monitor application performance
• Tools and techniques to measure application performance, which includes:

• • Exploring App Metrics

• • Setting up App Metrics used with ASP.NET Core applications

• • Setting up Grafana and using the App Metrics...

Application performance key metrics

The following are some key metrics to be considered for web-based applications.

Average response time

In every web application, response time is the key metric to be considered when monitoring application performance. Response time is the total time taken by the server to process the request. It is a time which is calculated when the request is received by the server which the time server then takes to process it and return a response. It can be affected by network latency, active users, the number of active requests, and CPU and memory usage on the server. The average response time is the total average time of all the requests being processed by the server at a particular time.

...

Tools and techniques to measure performance

There are various tools available on the market that can be used to measure and monitor application performance. In this section, we will focus on App Metrics and analyse HTTP traffic, errors, and network performance.

Introducing App Metrics

App Metrics is an open source tool that can be plug in with the ASP.NET Core applications. It provides real-time insights about how the application is performing and provides a complete overview of the application's health status. It provides metrics in a JSON format and integrates with the Grafana dashboards for visual reporting. App Metrics is based on .NET Standard and runs cross-platform. It provides various extensions and reporting...

Summary

In this chapter, we have learned some key metrics which are essential for monitoring application performance. We explored and set up App Metrics, which is a free tool that runs cross-platform and provides a lot of extensions that can be added to achieve more reporting. We went through the step-by-step guide on how to configure and set up App Metrics and related components like InfluxDb and Grafana to store and view telemetry in the Grafana web-based tool and integrate it with ASP.NET Core application.