Monitoring WCF service with AppFabric

With AppFabric you can monitor your WCF services.

You’ve got two ways for this :

The first one by editing the config file,

Add this section :

 <microsoft.applicationServer> 
    <monitoring> 

      <default enabled="true" connectionStringName="DefaultApplicationServerExtensions" monitoringLevel="Troubleshooting" /> 
    </monitoring> 
</microsoft.applicationServer>

The connectionStringName attribute should contain a reference to an existing connection string in the ConnectionString section, and that’s the database used by AppFabric to store the monitoring events.

The monitoringLevel attribute specifies the number of events you want to capture in a service execution. The possible values for this setting are,

• Off (monitoringLevel= »Off”): No data is collected. It would be equivalent to have monitoring disabled.
• Errors only (monitoringLevel= »ErrorsOnly”):  Only errors and warnings events are collected. This is very useful when you don’t want to incur into performance issues for collecting application events but you still want to know about any error may happen during the execution.
• Health Monitoring (monitoringLevel=HealthMonitoring): This is the default level and collects enough application events to show different metrics in the AppFabric dashboard.
• End To End Monitoring (monitoringLevel= »EndToEndMonitoring”). It collects all the events from the Health Monitoring level, plus additional events to reconstruct the message flow. For example, Service A called Service B. You will get also events representing info about the Service B call if monitoring is enabled on Service A.
• Troubleshooting (monitoringLevel= »Troubleshooting »). This is the most verbose of all, so it is appropriate for troubleshooting an unhealthy application.

The second way is more friendly use :

1. Start or switch to IIS Manager.
2. In the Connections pane, select the server, site, or application you want to configure.
3. Right-click the item. On the context menu, click Manage WCF and WF Services, and then click Configure.Alternatively, you can use the Actions pane instead of the context menu. Find the Manage WCF and WF Services section, and then click Configure.
4. When the Configure WF and WCF dialog box appears, click the Monitoring tab.
5. View or change settings as necessary. If you change settings, click OK to apply the settings and close the dialog box, or click Apply to apply settings without closing the dialog box. Click Cancel to close the dialog box without saving. (source MSDN) 

Note : the second modify the config file too

Activate net.tcp Binding in AppFabric

When you host a WCF service in WAS (IIS) and use non http protocol, when you browse your svc you can obtain this error :

The protocol ‘net.tcp’ is not supported.

No BizTalk is not dead

Great news from the WPC 2011, people say « BizTalk will be replaced by AppFabric » , BizTalk will survive

Effectively, the next BizTalk’s version will have a lot modification and great evolution.

To explan it quickly, BizTalk and AppFabric will fuse, they keep the messageBox, the pipeline but they use WF instead of Orchestration Engine.

So BizTalk is gonna change but not disappear.

I think this direction is a great evolution and for sure it’s a good choice. All BizTalk consultant face to the question « how to sell BizTalk » with this new version I think it will be easier. Moreover, centralization of all tools will simplify developper’s job. I hope it will be the end of map functoid coded in VB6. With Workflow foundation, we can finally use generic type in process.

 

My question is when can we test the next version.

Too see the WPC session : http://digitalwpc.com/Videos/AllVideos/Permalink/e821e9f8-e379-45b0-8879-12fe271c86be#fbid=MMzqFnysqAi

 

Another great article on this subject  from Seroter, BzTalk MVP : http://seroter.wordpress.com/2011/07/14/is-biztalk-server-going-away-at-some-point-yes-dead-nope/

 

So we have to wait for the next Beta.