I got pulled back in to diagnosing performance issues on an old friend, and it lead me into some dead code with a chance for resuscitation.
Trouble with the WCF
One of our applications has a set of WCF Services that serve the client. We had not instrumented them manually for performance metrics, although we found that System.ServiceModel
is well decorated for trace, so adding a trace listener gives us a bevy of information. However, it’s all in *.svclog files (using an XML Trace Listener), so there is still a lot to do in order to find out what’s wrong. A colleague asked if Application Insights could work. And that suggested started me down a path.
I found the lab
I reached out to some contacts at Microsoft, and they pointed me to the Application Insights SDK Labs. In that lab is a library that instruments WCF services and applications. The problem: it hasn’t been updated in about 5 years.
I figured, our application is based on technology about that old, I suppose I could try it. So I followed the instructions, and I started getting telemetry in my Application Insights instance! However, I did notice a few things:
- The library as published relies on an old Application Insights version (2.5.0, I believe). The Application Insights libraries are up to 2.21, which means we may not see everything we can.
- The library is based on .Net Framework 4.5, not 4.6.2, which is what we are using.
So I did what any sensible developer does…. fork it!
I’ll do it myself!
I forked the repository, created a branch, and got to work upgrading. Since this is just for work (right now), I did not bother to setup CI/CD yet, and took some liberties in assuming we would be running .Net Framework 4.6.2 for a while.
I had to wade through the repository setup a bit: There is a lot of configuration around Nuget and versioning, and, frankly, I wasn’t looking to figure that out right now. However, I did manage to get new library built, including updating the references to Microsoft.Application insights.
Again, in the interest of time and test, I manually pushed the package I built to our internal Nuget feed. I’m going to get this pushed to a development environment so that I can get some better telemetry than just the few calls that get made in my local environment.
Next Steps?
If this were an active project, I would probably have made a little more effort to do things the way they were originally structured and “play in the sandbox.” However, with no contribution rules or guidelines and no visible build pipeline, I am on my own with this one.
If this turns out to be reasonably useful, I will probably take a look at the rest of the projects in that repository. I may also tap my contacts at Microsoft for some potential “next steps” with this one: while I do not relish the thought of owning a public archive, perhaps I could at least get a copy of their build pipeline so that I can replicate it on my end. Maybe a GitHub Actions pipeline with a push to Nuget?? Who knows.