Whats the best way to monitor a website on Azure

[David]

I have recently started using Azure as my preferred platform for hosting my website and was wondering what the best version is for monitoring my website. The .Net or the Javascript version? 

Also is there a simple example of implementing this into a website? (Could't find one quickly) 

I am just trying this out to see how it compares to the likes of google analytics etc. 

Thanks in advance.

[Soren]

Hello David,

In terms of monitoring a website, the initial question in terms of picking the correct monitor is: Are you monitoring the server or the users. If you want to monitor your server you should pick up the .NET monitor and instrument your server code to better understand what the server is doing in terms of features used (across all users), timing of operations and unhandled expceptions. If you are looking for monitoring of your end users, you should be looking at the javascript monitor and have it included in your pages that are sent to your end users. You can read a bit more about the differences in this blogpost: http://www.telerik.com/analytics/resources/blog/13-06-26/eqatec-analytics-in-asp.net which also includes an example of adding the .NET monitor into the serverside code.

In terms of comparing with e.g. google analytics, the comparison is only relevant for the javascript monitor. Furthermore, we try to target web application in general and SinglePageApps in particular with the javascript monitor so you'll find features in our monitor that is concerned with capturing errors and tracking e.g. timing of the users engagement with the web app but you will not find features that directly relate to e.g. marketing campaigns which google analytics does well.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you need further information and I'd be happy to help

 

Regards,
Soren
Telerik

[Tomica]

David, I am now porting an ASP.NET application from the client's IIS server to Azure. I will be able to provide you with some details on how I have implemented the ASP.NET server-side tracking.

I will be following Soren's advice regarding the JS client-side monitor when it gets out of beta.

Also note that I have another post on monitoring options for Azure web sites, still waiting for feedback there.

[Jelly Master]

That's great thanks. It is exciting times for me at the moment as I have been updating my skill set massively over the last 6 months yet analytics and monitoring is still a bit like black magic at times in trying to determine what is useful to monitor and what is not. I guess this is something that comes with experience. 

In addition using azure has been a massive learning curve as well. 

How does this compare to the likes of Elmah, log4Net, glimpse etc. or are these looking at different areas to EQATEC. 

I do have to sit down and really look into this more but have more pressing pieces of my project to get working. 

[Soren]

Hi guys,

We currently do not have any concrete guidance on how to best integrate the EQATEC monitor in an azure website, so the best bet is to take a look at the asp.net guidance, which I believe should get you off the ground on azure.

The EQATEC analytics does not directly compare to the mentioned tools, although there are some overlapping areas. log4net is a logging framework which you'd probably use throughout your application to be able to troubleshoot issues and write quite verbose content to e.g. a log file. Elmah is a drop-in module for asp.net which automatically hooks into different application lifecycle events and can do e.g. error handling/tracking locally on your servers. Glimpse is a debugging/performance monitoring tool that allows you to very easily gain insights into specific issues with how your site is serving and rendering content.

Very generally speaking, while the above tools are mostly focused on a presence on the web server,  EQATEC analytics is concerned with gathering information and sending this to our servers for a condensed view of different aspects of your application. EQATEC analytics does have a mechanism for gathering exceptions which slightly correlate to e.g. Elmah, but EQATEC focuses on gathering and correlating the exceptions on our servers and present you with a overview of this. EQATEC also provides a way to programmatically collect feature usage (in a broad sense) from your servers so you could e.g. understand which parts of your application gets the most traction etc.

Hope this helps
 
Regards,
Soren
Telerik

[Bil]

Hi guys,

I'm just launching our self service portal built on MVC and running in Azure. I thought I would hook up EQATEC into the apps to see what the analytics would do. We also have mobile (Xamarin) apps that we're launching but those will be using Xamarin analytics. 

I went through the documentation linked above to add it to the apps (1 is the client website, the other is the backend api and an admin dashboard). I have it hooked up in 3 environments (DEV/TEST/PROD) all running in Azure.

I'm really not happy with what I'm getting form EQATEC as it's really more oriented for mobile apps. Most of the data coming from analytics is listing all the users as coming from the server so geography shows it as Seattle (all of my users are in Canada) so nothing from the client side is getting through. The other things is I've blown my 100 device limit with one of the environments but I'm only running 2 websites in each environment. I think it's seeing every connection or restart of the site or something as a new device, I'm not sure.

In short, I really don't recommend this for websites. I'm sure it's a great tool for mobile apps but websites, not so much. Looking now at other tools for this.

[Serge]

Hello Bil,

You are entirely correct in assuming that our product is targeted at mobile analytics. The whole Telerik Platform is in fact mobile oriented.

Aside from that I'd like to thank you for sharing your thoughts and findings. Do note, that we will be more than happy to help you out with Telerik Analytics, should you decide to give it another chance. 

Regards,
Serge
Telerik