P&P Summit Day Four: Dynamic Systems Initiative and Designing for Operations

Next up was David Aiken, who’s a platform development evangelist for Microsoft. His talk was on instrumenting your applications for operations.

He started off with why you want to instrument your application. How do you know if your application is working or is not working? Instrumentation answers this question. Adding instrumentation means adding events that provide good diagnostic and resolution information to operations staff and Enterprise Management Applications. David would like to see the usage of the Windows Application Log for the destination of these events. He also talked about performance counters as a viable option to help with proactive monitoring of the application.

David talked about designing applications for operations by including a GUI for administration of configuration and health models (the thing that tells you if your app is working, what’s wrong with it, etc.). He suggested that PowerShell could be used to build admin functionality so that the IT Pros could create scripts against the functionality and also build a MMC snap-in directly on top of it. He also stated that installers should be created to perform the deployment. I completely agree with that.

The rest of the talk is about why you should do this type of instrumentation and admin tools. He also had a demo of an instrumented application.

He did show that with 2.0 we can create event types for the event log that can be localized with something called message files. These are compiled right into the assembly. He indicated the documentation for this was on MSDN somewhere.

I tried to Google this for about 30 seconds and didn’t find it right away. This would be helpful, but I wonder if there is a way to extend EntLib to deal with this within the EventLog TraceListener.

At the end of his talk David showed a little about PowerShell.

I definitely need to think more about instrumentation for operations in my designs, though probably not to the extent that David talked about.