Does my site have performance issues?

Let’s dive in. Application Insights is an essential tool for monitoring and diagnosing performance problems. It delivers real-time metrics, error logs, and detailed diagnostic data. We utilize this information in combination with our custom profiler to enable our Performance Architects to optimize applications effectively.

Key metrics for our Performance Architects are located in Application Insights in the Azure portal. On the Overview page, they review server response times, failed requests, and overall application availability. These metrics provide a high-level view of your application’s health and help us identify potential symptoms of performance issues.

For example, our Performance Architects closely examine the Server Response Time chart. Spikes in response times often signal performance bottlenecks. When such anomalies are detected, they dig deeper to identify the specific areas slowing down your application.

Additionally, our team investigates the “Dependencies” tab. Dependencies represent external calls your application makes, such as database queries or API requests. If slow response times are identified, our Performance Architects analyze these dependencies to locate and address the root cause. For example, if an API included in your analysis package takes 2.5 seconds to execute, they drill down into the dependency details to identify the cause of the slow down of the dependency.

They also leverage the “Failures” tab to pinpoint problematic areas. Some performance issues translate into failures or exceptions shown here. For instance, if they notice a spike in 500 errors on an endpoint like “/api/orders,” they examine the stack trace to determine what caused the failure and implement a solution.

Our Performance Architects rely on our custom profiler to monitor the server around the clock, ensuring continuous visibility into application health. This profiler is designed to trigger collection of the necessary information, dump or trace, automatically when any number of internal resource constraints arise, such as high CPU usage, memory pressure, or thread pool exhaustion. By leveraging .NET Core event counters, our customer profiler captures critical diagnostic data in real time, allowing our team to identify performance bottlenecks and resource contention as they occur. This proactive monitoring ensures that issues are diagnosed proactively, enabling swift resolution to maintain optimal application performance.

By leveraging both Azure Application Insights and our custom profiler, our Performance Architects can detect, diagnose, and resolve performance issues swiftly, ensuring your applications run optimally.

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In order to help you determine whether your site has performance issues, immediately, we’ve put together two different scripts that you can use against your existing Application Insights to determine whether you’re having outages, response time slowness, and also what the hypothetical revenue impact may be.

Below, you’ll find instructions on how to utilize the scripts. If you have any questions regarding them or the output, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us via our Contact Us page.