How to Optimize Your .NET Apps with Performance Monitoring

Quick Overview:
.NET performance monitoring must be conducted once your application is in a production environment. But, there are quite a few best practices and tools that must be used for it. In this blog, you will discover all potential practices and tool categories that should be on your list. It will help you ensure exceptional software performance for all potential users.

Introduction

.NET performance monitoring is a must to conduct operations to retain application speed, stability, scalability, and obviously the performance under different production scenarios. But, it can only be possible if appropriate best practices are followed and relevant tools are used. Otherwise, the results can be the fronting of the expectations. 

But you don’t need to fret, as every crucial aspect to consider for performance monitoring is listed here. So, let’s have a look at them. 

What is .NET Performance Monitoring?

.NET performance monitoring is the practice of constantly analyzing the application to find bottlenecks, bugs, and issues lowering the software’s performance. Under this process, development, operations, and security teams collaborate to ensure seamless application working in a production environment. 

In addition, performance monitoring is conducted frequently to achieve customer satisfaction, engagement, and all other technical and business metrics. 

Best Performance Monitoring Practices To Improve .NET Applications

With the help of performance monitoring best practices, you can improve your application’s functionality, availability, and quality of services. The following are the top seven practices that you should consider implementing in your organization. 

1: Declare Performance Metrics Before Deployment

Performance monitoring can only be beneficial if you have the answer to its “Why.” Firstly, you should define the goal of your application, such as boosting user engagement with it, automating processes, increasing user base, or something similar. Once you have a clear goal, you will know about the metrics that you need to monitor. 

In addition, defining metrics will help you choose the right tool and hire .NET developers according to extended run needs. Due to this, you will save your time, cost, and resources and also increase the ROI on the amount invested for .NET app development. 

Furthermore, you should ensure that both quantitative and qualitative metrics are focused equally. Otherwise, it can impact the long-term results, and you can strive to meet the targets per dynamic business requirements. Additionally, you should test the app under different circumstances to discover its lack of operability points and fix them to maintain stability. 

2: Collect End-User Experience Information 

End-user experience is considered one of the most important pillars of performance monitoring. It helps to understand the application and server-client communication from the targeted audience’s perspective. Primarily, there are two ways, as below, which can help you provide user insights:

1. By collecting detailed feedback from the end-users.
2. By using the .NET application as an end-user and analyzing every feature and functionality under different scenarios. 

When you collaborate with a top-notch .NET development and maintenance company, they will conduct both procedures. But, if you are not able to do so, one can also help you to some extent. 

Once you start analyzing the user feedback and insights, you will discover the potential pain points and the application’s accuracy, processing, speed, stability, and security in real-time. Further, you can take all the data and cross-verify it with your defined metrics. If you find both the values satisfying each other, you should plan to retain and improve it. Otherwise, you should update the current app version to fulfill objectives. 

3: Constantly Update and Improve 

Continuous application improvement always helps optimize the performance and achieve defined business and technical metrics. You should consider following the below-listed approaches. 

• Update the framework whenever a newer version is available. 
• Utilize optimal and latest hardware and software for the server. 
• Ensure that security mechanisms are properly working and any hidden malware is not impacting the performance. 
• Review the code and remove unnecessary code blocks to reduce compilation and loading time. 

In addition, whenever you need to update the .NET application, test the newer version in an isolated or virtual production environment. It will help you discover the potential loopholes and areas of improvement. Then, you can fix the issues and release a stable and compatible update. 

Improving the .NET application is a continuous task until the software is in use. So, you should hire .NET developers for .NET performance monitoring operations. 

4: Configure Automated Incident Response 

Automated incident response is an integral approach for optimizing the availability of .NET applications. It comes in handy when unexpected resource utilization is increased or a server crashes. To implement it, you need .NET automation experts and a risk assessment report. The report will list all the expected use cases that can impact the application’s working. 

 Further, you can create automated workflows accordingly and test them in virtual environments. In addition, real-time scenarios can also be generated to verify the functionality of automated operations. 

To effectively automate the processes, you should prefer the following three points. 

1. Your organization should use robust detection tools that can work in collaboration with the server OS and .NET application technology stack.
2. The assessment should include all the risks and expected scenarios where automation can help. Both primary and secondary stakeholders should be covered under it. 
3. You should thoroughly test all the automated controls and ensure that minimal or no human interference is required for them. 

5: Define and Understand Monitoring Objectives 

The .NET performance monitoring contains a different set of metrics that you need to analyze. If any of the metrics is missed, it can lead to a lack of business. So, it’s important to focus on all the below-listed performance metrics. 

• Availability

Availability is the core aspect as per performance monitoring and security standards. Your application must be available to use at a defined time. For this, you can use cloud platforms, such as Amazon AWS. Also, you can use container-based deployment so that updating one feature doesn’t impact the rest of the application’s availability. 

• Response Time 

You need to focus on request receiving, processing, and replying time. It will aid you in understanding the speed of your application. Your main objective should be ensuring request replies in minimal time to end-users as well as internal services. 

• Transactions 

By monitoring transactions, you can discover the inconsistency between components, bottlenecks, and other aspects impacting performance. It will support you in tracking the root cause during troubleshooting and quickly resolve it. 

• Error rate 

Errors must be low or zero. If you see an increased error rate, immediately start debugging and testing the application to find bugs, error causes, and glitches. Following it, fix all the components and then only publish the software. 

• Resource Utilization 

Resource utilization will help you understand the component being used more and at what time. For instance, if your CPU is being used more and storage usage is less, then you can invest more in the CPU. Similarly, you can make decisions for other resources and enhance the one in demand.

6: Remove Tool Sprawls 

Using too many tools for performance monitoring and optimizing .NET applications can hamper the overall functionality. The tools can be incompatible with each other, making collaboration difficult for different teams associated with a .NET software. 

A single application performance management (APM) tool is recommended to resolve this issue. These tools contain all the features for associated personnel, such as members of DevOps, security, testing, and site reliability teams. All can use a single solution for executing their operations. 

Due to this, collaboration will increase, data will be shared securely, and efforts to manage multiple tools will be eliminated. Also, you will have a streamlined workflow for all the tasks, leading to complete work within minimal time. 

7: Utilize Relevant Monitoring and Collaboration Tools 

Monitoring and collaboration are the two primary tool categories that you should consider to be high priorities. Selecting relevant monitoring tools will help you gain detailed application performance insights that can be shared with relevant persons or teams to work further. 

But to share the gathered information with the right person, you need a collaboration tool, such as JIRA, Slack, or something similar. These tools help to raise a ticket, upload relevant files, and track the progress. The persons associated with the task can communicate effectively and optimize the .NET application per defined metrics. 

Whether it’s a website, mobile app, desktop software, or web application, you should utilize both of these tools. Remember that the tools must be compatible with each other. Otherwise, you are required to create custom APIs to connect them. 

Top .NET and ASP.NET Monitoring Tools Preferred By Professionals

With the best practices, you also need .NET and ASP.NET monitoring tools. Here, we have listed the performance monitoring tools per their category and purpose. You can find all these tools in a single package to make your operations more streamlined, collaborative, and stable. 

1: .NET application Performance Analysis Tools 

The .NET performance tools are used to analyze the user requests and server responses. The main aim of utilizing these tools is to ensure that requests are being processed within a minimal time and with utmost accuracy. 

You can use such tools in the development and production environment and check the application’s working in different use cases. Stackify Retrace and JetBrains dotTrace are the top performance analysis tools to go by. 

2: .NET APM (Application Performance Management) 

Application performance management or APM tools are the all-in-one solution that every firm should use. Tools under this category contain every required feature, from code profiling to analyzing each web request’s performance. 

In addition, APM aids in quickly identifying slow request processing, bottlenecks in the database, and more. Professionals prefer these tools but can be expensive and run only on on-premises servers. 

3: ASP.NET and .NET Code Profilers

Code profiling tools support determining a deep analysis of the memory, network, and CPU utilization of a .NET application. These tools can check every component and are mostly used by QA experts to discover disproportionate resource utilization. 

In the .NET ecosystem, AMD CodeXL, JetBrains dotTrace, RedGate Ants, and Telerik JustTrace are the top tools under the code profiler category. You can use these to track issues and resolve them.

4: Windows OS Performance Counters

If you use a Windows operating system server, you can leverage built-in performance counters. They help to determine the following performance components: 

• Garbage collection 
• HTTP error rate 
• CPU utilization 
• Memory utilization 
• Request Queuing 

You can use these counters without installing any third-party tool. However, advanced level knowledge of Windows OS is required. Otherwise, it can be difficult to analyze multiple apps on a single server. 

5: End-User Real-Time Monitoring

The main purpose of using a real-time monitoring tool is to determine the time used by the client device to download images, JavaScript, and other necessary files. It helps the development team to choose the right approach for making files lightweight for the end-users. 

As a result, you provide a more convenient, less resource-utilizing, and fast-loading .NET application to the customers. It’s preferred to use this tool frequently with a growing user base and whenever an update is released.

6: Log Management Tool 

Logs are one of the most important data that help discover the root causes of performance and security issues. You should store the logs of your web server, preferably IIS, in the case of .NET and ASP.NET applications. 

Once you start storing and analyzing logs, you will see reduced time for bug fixing, better customer experience, enhanced security, and more transparency. You can use Datadog IIS, WebLog Expert, and SolarWinds solutions for analyzing .NET app logs. 

7: Failed Request Tracing Tool 

The failed request tracing mechanism is built into the IIS server. It helps the professionals to trace transactions to their core. This IIS feature can be enabled and disabled at any time according to the requirements. You can even automate it per specific event or HHTP status code. 

However, sometimes it’s difficult to read its output, as the files are quite large and in XML format. But, besides this, it’s still highly used due to its exceptional functionality in both development and production environments.

8: Exception Tracking Tool 

Exceptions are one of the biggest issues in lowering the application performance. A single exception can create bottlenecks in the entire system and increase the load on the server. Mostly, exceptions are caused due to violations of normal semantics. 

To track down exceptions, you can use tools like NLog and dlog4net. Testing the application thoroughly is also preferred to handle the exceptions efficiently.

How Do You Hire .NET Developers for Performance Monitoring?

To hire .NET developers for performance monitoring, you should look for an aesthetic .NET development company with a minimum of 10+ years of experience. Such a firm can provide exceptional human resources and is highly expert in monitoring and enhancing the application’s overall functionality. 

In addition, you should ensure that the firm you choose to collaborate with must offer transparency, sign an NDA, use an agile approach, and not charge any additional cost. Further, you can assess their portfolio and interview their .NET developers to learn more and make better decisions. 

Concluding Up

Performance monitoring is an essential task that must be performed for every .NET application. It helps to understand the flaws, issues, bugs, and bottlenecks impacting the software’s speed, stability, and other metrics. 

Before you start the performance monitoring, define your metrics and create a plan to achieve them. It will help you choose the right set of tools and approaches. Further, you can follow the best practices listed in this blog and configure exception tracing, performance counters, or an APM. With all these mechanisms, the .NET application performance will be enhanced.