End-to-end monitoring platform for .Net applications performs root cause analysis A few weeks ago CEO Mike Curreri, CTO Victor Mushkatin, and VP of Marketing Marty Brandwin gave me a briefing on and demo of AVICode’s Intercept Studio, a low-overhead end-to-end monitoring platform for .Net applications. Their basic point was that operations and development need to communicate better to monitor and troubleshoot production application performance and faults, especially on critical line-of-business applications.Of course, they had a solution, in AVICode Intercept Studio. It’s also a solution that Microsoft has endorsed, in the form of a stripped-down version called the .Net Management Pack for MOM.Basically, the Intercept Studio product monitors applications at the CLR level. That process can capture enough information for a root-cause analysis of a performance problem or program fault without significantly affecting the normal run-time performance of the application. For example, have a look at these two screen shots: In the image above we’re seeing the root cause of a SOAP exception, down to the line of code. In the image below we’re seeing the time breakdown for the display of a page.One of the reasons that this kind of monitoring is useful is that conventional debugging and profiling just aren’t appropriate for production servers; at the same time many of the problems affecting production servers are hard to reproduce on a development machine. AVICode is offering visibility into .Net applications that is similar to what Five Runs and New Relic offer for Ruby on Rails applications.The trend toward SaaS (software as a service) with SLAs makes such monitoring all the more important. Otherwise, how can you guarantee that you’ve delivered the service level specified in your contracts? Technology Industry