Over the past couple of weeks we’ve noticed that our Reporting service is terribly slow. The above chart is part of our APM (Application Performance Monitoring) solution built on top of MiniProfiler and Splunk (see this blog post for more details). Our reporting service works by processing messages which are queued up by various other services onto a queue in RabbitMQ. What this chart is showing is that the reporting service is working at a very constant and slow pace.

Last week I deployed a new Api hosted as an Azure WebApp, we wanted some reporting events to come out of it into our Splunk instance so we could keep an eye on whether it is working as expected. I started off by using the Splunk C# SDK as it looked nice and easy to add into our app. A very trivial example of using the Splunk SDK would look like this:

At DrDoctor we are slowly adopting Splunk as our central reporting repository. We already have most of our application specific events going into it and we are already seeing some great benefits. In this post I’m going to show the various steps I went through to get our log4net files being ingested in a useful format. Monitoring a file is easy, extracting useful fields is sometimes a challenge especially with log files.

At DrDoctor we use New Relic for performance monitoring of our web applications. However web only makes up a small part of our overall system. We make extensive use of a messaging based system and have lots of micro-services which communicate over a messaging bus. After adding New Relic to our Windows services we soon realized that they don’t really do a good job of supporting them. The main reason for this afar as I can see from reading their docs is that New Relic depends on an active HttpContext for profiling applications.

Recently I’ve been replacing the use of Bit.ly as a link shortener with Google’s link shortener service (goo.gl) in one of our .Net projects. It’s pretty easy to get going with their handy .Net NuGet package and sample code, however what wasn’t obvious was how to pass the HTTP requests through a proxy. After a bit of digging around, it turned out to be pretty easy: The first thing that needs to be done is to create our own ProxySupportedHttpClientFactory class, which inherits from the Google APIs HttpClientFactory class and override the CreateHandler method to return a different handler:

Recently, I’ve been replacing bit.ly with the Google URL shortener service for a .Net project. It’s a pretty simple service, and the documentation shows very clearly how to get going. Google have 3 different ways of authenticating using OAuth 2.0 (details), the method I am using is as a “Service Account”. Their code sample is thus: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 String serviceAccountEmail = "SERVICE_ACCOUNT_EMAIL_HERE"; var certificate = new X509Certificate2(@"key.