How to monitor a .NET (Core) app in the cloud?

Question

We have a webapp consisting of different front- and back-end components. Most of these components are built with .NET Framework (ASP.NET), some are built with ASP.NET Core. Our product is currently installed on-premise at customers, but we're now moving our product to the cloud (AWS).

Now that we move our product to the cloud, we are also investigating how we can monitor our components. We've been investigating New Relic and Dynatrace, and both of them give Distributed Tracing, which will show us the performance of a request as it moves through our application. But we're wondering if this will provide us with enough information to find the root cause of an incident. E.g. both tools are able to pinpoint which API call was slow, but they don't provide details why it was slow, or which method inside that API call was slow.

So what are your experiences with APM tools like Dynatrace and New Relic? Do they provide enough information in case of incidents? Or do you still need other tools, like a .NET Profiler, to find the root cause?

Answer 1

Dynatrace gives you full details how requests are moving through your application.

• With Service Flow you can visualize that path.
• With Response time hotspot you can view details how your request executed
• With Method hospot you can determine where was the slowest method in request chain
• with Backtrace you can understand what services are depend on your service request
• Tab Failure rate gives you information about all errors with description and further analysis
• Problems tab gives you full information about incident and analyze root cause of it. Baseling in action, with support of AI.

Main success story in my case was when Dynatrace help us find developers errors in code execution.