Hands-on with AVIcode
Here in the Orinoko ivory tower we’re too busy mixing our metaphors to let the grass grow under our feet. And so to AVIcode.
According to the product homepage “AVIcode delivers market-leading .NET application performance monitoring capabilities to help ensure the availability of business-critical applications and services, regardless of where they are deployed. End-user experience and application performance monitoring are critical in virtual datacenters and cloud environments…”
I couldn’t agree more. In case the marketing is a bit of a blur for you AVIcode does a number of very cool things:
- It provides extraordinarily detailed and intelligent monitoring of web applications.
- Jump-to-code debugging of .Net applications
- Lots of graphs. Lots and lots of graphs.
All of this stuff is fully, and very elegantly, integrated into the Operations Manager console. To illustrate the concept, join me for a cocktail…
I am monitoring the OpsMgr Web Console to make sure that it’s always available for my busy admins. I have a good view of the health of the application from a datacentre and IIS perspective.
I do not, however, have any view of the end-user experience.
In the recent past, we would have provided an end-user perspective by deploying an OpsMgr agent to a machine outside of the datacentre and had it carry out a synthetic web session against the application. This works great, and can give us some really useful telemetry, but it’s still a little limited.
AVIcode provides a much more elegant solution to client-side monitoring by injecting some client-side code into page requests which then deliver telemetry data back to the monitoring infrastructure. This gives us real-time views of the performance of the application from the end-user’s perspective and can alert us to performance problems and failures and provide detailed information around the cause of those failures. It creates a Distributed App to illustrate this:
So if a user is getting an error. We can be alerted to this…
…and given code-level information around the cause of the problem
Next time we’ll have fun with graphs…
