#Introduction to StackTracer
This article provides an introduction to StackTracer for developers and system/server administrators. By reading it, you learn:
- What StackTracer is and the value it provides to troubleshooting your applications
- How to capture traces of any .net application running in production
- How to analyze the trace files and find the root cause of issue
#What is StackTracer
A tool that captures and analyzes stack trace samples captured at fixed intervals from any .net CLR process.
The Stacktracer is a console application attaches using the debugengine Interface and works with any .net process; no access to application source code is necessary, no library modifications are needed, and there is no run-time instrumentation of CLR code. Configuration options given at start of command line to specify the interval for stack trace and number of samples.Current implementation include output generation in xml/xslt for viewing the most recent stack traces. The performance impact of the stacktracer is minimal: less than a 8% increase in total elapsed time for a set of standard benchmarks. Future plans include GUI, better filtering capabilities in analysis.
##Highlights
- 800 kb single exe file(no installation required) with only dependency of .net framework 4.0 client profile.
- Captures stack trace of any .net process Windows forms ,WPF, asp.net you name it.
- No need of any symbol files.
- You can troubleshoot applications written in .net framework 2.0 to 4.5
- Target 32 bit and 64 bit process.
- View traces in browser. (inspired from IIS FREB)
- Intuitive timeline view to filter out unwanted stacks/threads.
- Very easy to troubleshoot Hang or High CPU issues on production enviroments.
- Less overhead on the running process,so you can troubleshoot slow performance issues which are less than 5 seconds .
##Limitations
- Needs .NET framework 4.0
- Will not show any native stack information.
- That means if the hang is due to GC, this may not help you.
##Downloads
| ID | Category | Bitness |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Azure Websites | x86 | x64 |
| 2 | .NET Process | x86 | x64 |