Monitor .NET Nodes

This page describes specific considerations for monitoring .NET applications and how to fine-tune the configuration for .NET frameworks and technologies. These include, for example, monitoring and configuration pages for your IIS applications, Windows services, and standalone applications.

Once you instrument your .NET application environment with the .NET Agent, you can start monitoring .NET application performance. See Splunk AppDynamics Essentials.

Monitor Windows Hardware Resources

This page describes how to monitor Windows hardware resources with the .NET Machine Agent. The .NET Agent includes an embedded .NET Machine Agent that runs as part of the AppDynamics.Agent.Coordinator service. The .NET Machine Agent regularly gathers system performance data metrics such as:

  • CPU activity
  • Memory usage
  • Disk reads and writes
  • Network traffic
  • Percent free disk space and megabytes free

You can view Windows Hardware Resource metrics in the Metric Browser. When IIS is installed on the machine, the .NET Machine Agent also reports IIS, ASP.NET, and ASP.NET Application metrics. See Monitor IIS. The .NET Machine Agent also reports CLR metrics, which are based on performance counters. See Monitor CLRs.

For applications running on the Windows Azure platform, Splunk AppDynamics disables these hardware resource monitoring and machine agent features:

  • CLR crash reporting
  • Machine snapshots
  • Performance counter metrics

Machine Snapshots for .NET

Sometimes environmental conditions cause trouble on the machines where your application runs. Issues that occur outside monitored application code don't show up on transaction snapshots. Machine snapshots provide critical details about CPU usage, memory usage, and the IIS queue on a server at a specific moment in time. Use the data in machine snapshots to uncover and resolve environmental problems.

Splunk AppDynamics generates machine snapshots to capture the state of a server at a specific moment in time. The machine snapshots show the processes running on the machine, the IIS application pool activity, and any related transaction snapshots. By default the .NET Machine Agent takes machine snapshots under these conditions:

  • Periodic collection: The agent takes one snapshot every 10 minutes.
  • Breached thresholds: The .NET Machine Agent takes samples of machine statistics every 10 seconds within a 10-minute window. For each sample, the agent checks the CPU percent usage, the memory percent usage, and the oldest item in the IIS application pool queue. The agent flags a sample as a violation when the current usage meets or exceeds one of these thresholds:

    • CPU at 80% or higher

    • Memory at 80% or higher

    • IIS application pool queue item older than 100 milliseconds
    The agent takes a snapshot when it identifies 6 violations of a single type, such as CPU usage, within the window. The agent only takes one snapshot per window for breached thresholds.

To customize the periodic collection or threshold settings, see Configure Machine Snapshots for .NET.