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Enable Service Profiler for containerized ASP.NET Core application

Enable Service Profiler for ASP.NET Core application running in Linux Container is very easy and almost code free.

This example assumes you already have an ASP.NET Core Application. If you are new to ASP.NET, follow the Get Started for .NET Core Application or just clone and use this project.

This example is a bare bone project created by calling the following cli command:

dotnet new mvc -n EnableServiceProfilerForContainerApp

To make it real, make use the following code to add some delay in the controllers to simulate the bottleneck:

private void SimulateDelay()
{
    // Delay for 500ms to 2s to simulate a bottleneck.
    Thread.Sleep((new Random()).Next(500, 2000));
}

Reference HomeController.cs for full code.

Pull the latest ASP.NET Core build/runtime images

docker pull mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/sdk:3.1
docker pull mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspnet:3.1

Tips: find the official images for sdk and runtime.

Create a Dockerfile for the application

To enable Service Profiler, NuGet package needs to be installed and proper environment variables need to be set. One way to reach the goal is adding the following lines to your Dockerfile. In this file:

  • It adds the reference to the NuGet package of Service Profiler before the build of the project happens.
  • It sets the connection string to Application Insights so that the application knows where to send the trace to.
  • It uses the hosting startup assembly for the entry point of Service Profiler.

To make your build context as small as possible add a .dockerignore file to your project folder.

Create an Application Insights resource

Follow the Create an Application Insights resource. Note down the instrumentation connection string.

Optionally set the log level to Information for Service Profiler

To see a simple log, you can add the following settings to appsettings.json to reveal some Service Profiler logs:

    "LogLevel": {
      "Default": "Warning",
      "ServiceProfiler":"Information"
    }

Just like in appsettings.json.

Build and run the Docker image

docker build -t enable-sp-example --build-arg APPINSIGHTS_CONN="YOUR_APPLICATION_INSIGHTS_CONNECTION_STRING" .
docker run -p 8080:80 --name enable-sp enable-sp-example

Note, replace YOUR_APPLICATION_INSIGHTS_CONNECTION_STRING with the real connection string from the previous step.

Once the container starts to run, the Service Profiler will kick in for 2 minutes.

View the web page running from a container

Go to localhost:8080 to access your app in a web browser. Use this chance to generate some web traffic for the Service Profiler to catch the traces.

Inspect the logs

If you have set up the Log Level to Information for Service Profiler and you run the container attached, you will see the info logs like it below:

info: ServiceProfiler.EventPipe.Client.Schedules.TraceSchedule[0]
      Service Profiler session started.
info: ServiceProfiler.EventPipe.Client.Schedules.TraceSchedule[0]
      Service Profiler session finished. Samples: 8
info: ServiceProfiler.EventPipe.Client.TraceUploader.TraceUploaderProxy[0]
      Finished calling trace uploader. Exit code: 0

When you see Samples number larger than 0, it means trace has been gathered.

You can also check the logs for the container:

docker container logs myapp

View the Service Profiler traces

  • Wait for 2-5 minutes so the events can be aggregated to Application Insights.
  • Open the Performance blade in the application insights resource created. Once the process of the trace is done, you will see the Profiler Traces button like it below:

Profiler Traces

Summary

To recap a bit, there are 2 major steps to enable Service Profiler:

  • Add the reference to the NuGet package.
  • Set the environment variables to enable it.

There are various ways to reach the same goal. The NuGet package could be installed in the project. The environment variable could be set by the orchestrator (like Kubernetes) as well.

And when it comes to production deployment, there are also other aspects to be considered, like the security. For example, how to protect Application Insights Instrumentation key from being leaked and so on.

All in all, we hope the Service Profiler will help improve the application performance! If you have any issues or suggestions, please report to issues.