Is there any third party tools available to Monitoring WCF Service?
I have created WCF Service with 5 Methods (OperationContracts) and Hosted in IIS.
Does there any tool available to specify how many times each method was called and what is Request and Response of the each call ? (Similar to SQL server profiler).
Use standart tracing and diagnostic tool for WCF, and work with .svclogs using SvcTraceViewer.exe application.
If you host under IIS, use AppFabric. It a great tool, when you can easily manage the settings of your services, including tracing and diagnostic. There is a nice article about using it http://www.dotnetcurry.com/ShowArticle.aspx?ID=771
The AppFabric Dashboard provides a centralized gateway to view and manage the health of WF and WCF services deployed locally or to a server farm. It exposes real-time data from the Persistence database and historic data from the Monitoring database, and it allows you to “drill down” to examine instance and WCF Call metrics in greater detail.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee677236(v=azure.10).aspx
AppFabric helps to monitor WCF service like How many time the operation is invoked, Errors/ Faults and also supports historical data.
Related
I have a WCF service that offers a standard SOAP interface over TCP/IP, HTTP or Named Pipes. This service computes and caches a large, complex, relational data set and offers views on it to clients, via high-level service operations. It's working perfectly.
I also have a separate custom OData service that offers the underlying data in a more "raw" form. This service shares some of the plumbing of the first, with respect to loading and caching the large, complex, relational data set, but is otherwise a standalone service that can be hosted apart from the first.
I'm currently hosting the standard SOAP service in IIS with Windows Process Activation Services, and I'm sure I can do the same thing with the OData service, as a separate endpoint.
If I wanted to host them together in the same IIS host process, what are my options for allowing the two services to share the underlying cached data set, to save on load time and memory consumption?
Assuming you can deal with the limitations of the Reflection Provider or are willing to deal with the complexity of a Custom Provider, you should be able to construct a caching layer that makes the same data available to both your WCF service and your WCF Data Service.
(This would also technically work with the Entity Framework provider, but it sounds like that might not be a good fit for your other needs.)
I can post a sample if you run into trouble getting it up and running.
I am designing a WCF service that will serve clients that request things like 'GetProduct' and 'UpdateProduct'. In addition, there will be another service that the clients will subscribe to that will send them PUSH notifications.
The 'PULL' and 'PUSH' WCF services will run under a Windows service.
I would like to encapsulate some sort of monitoring solution that allows me to open a WPF application that will connect to the services and show me how many clients are connected right now to both services (supposed to be identical) and will allow me to disconnect clients from the service and maybe view logs that the service has logged.
How do I design this on the services side ?
Do I need to create a 3rd service for the 'monitoring' app that when requested - will check how many clients are connected to the 'PULL' and 'PUSH' services ?
Or do I just add a function 'GetNumOfClients' and 'DisconnectClient' to the 'PUSH' and 'PULL' services ? this seems wrong, because it introduces logic to these services that does not belong there, and also allows clients to disconnect each other...
For logging use log4net or health monitoring. Log4net is versatile and configurable. You can turn on WCF diagnostics logging which has extensive information about what is going on with your service on You can read here how to turn on and use WMI providers to instrument your service and what performance counters are available.
Why is there a requirement for disconnecting a client? You can "disconnect" the client when you throw an exception in your method which fault's the client channel but beyond that you should not be concerned with managing service connections.
I need to create a web service to collect data from my customer’s applications.
Those applications are programmed with different technologies and they all have one thing in common: they can consume plain SOAP Web Service.
I already have a WCF Service that could be exposed but as it was built for internal purpose only, I never had to secure it.
I did read a lot of articles on how to secure WCF service and how to consume it from a Microsoft client application. However, I'm really concern about the customer’s non-microsoft applications abilities to implement a standard WCF Service security. I must keep in mind that some of them might be stateless and unable to hold on to a session or anything that might be required by a secure WCF Service.
So here are the options I have right now.
1) Add username/password parameters to each WCF function and perform a credential check on every call. (I do have an SSL certificate... is it enough to consider this option as secured?)
2) Drop my WCF Service and create a plain SOAP Web Service with username/password parameters as mentioned in option #1 to be closer to my customer’s applications capabilities.
3) Implement standard WCF security and let the customers find a way to deal with it on their own. (The real question here: is WCF security simple enough to be implemented by any SOAP client?)
4) Change my name and move to Jamaica with my customer’s money before they find out that I’m a Web Service security noob.
5) Something else…
So what is the my best option here?
Yes, I can offer the option we use. It sounds like you want basicHttpBinding.
We have a WCF web service using basicHttpBinding and set IIS to use basic http authentication.
Therefore non-.NET clients can consume it easily (basicHttpBinding) and we can give them an Active Directory domain account that allows them access via IIS. No usernames / passwords to constantly send back and forth through the web service and it runs over HTTPS for security.
It's currently being consumed by PHP, Java and .NET clients. Yes, .NET clients can still import this as a service reference which makes thing like trapping FaultExceptions easier.
No solution is perfect for everyone but works great for our needs.
Yes, but certain configurations favour certain vendors. See the WCF Express Interop Bindings project on CodePlex:
http://wcf.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=WCF%20Express%20Interop%20Bindings
They offer settings for interop with:
Oracle WebLogic
Oracle Metro
IBM WebSphere
Apache Axis2
The Oracle Metro (previously known as SUN WSIT) stack is by far the most advanced as regards the WS-*/Oasis standards.
I am starting a new webservice project which will be consumed by multiple consumer applications done in different technology like ASP, ASP.Net and PHP. I am planning to develop this service as a WCF service. I am new to WCF and I understand WCF is like umbrella tech which has all the features for developing a distributed SOA applications.
I would like to get your advice on whether my choice of opting WCF service over classic asmx service is correct. The consumer applications are existing application done different technologies as I said before. This service is a simple service that creates and updates user information in a centralized DB.
If my decision of choosing WCF is correct, then please let me know if there are any specific things I need to consider so that the existing application can consume my WCF service without any hiccups. In other words, I can provide a asmx service for this which they can consume directly without any issues (and currently they are consuming some of our asmx service. Since the current requirement is new I want it to be done with WCF). Likewise, the consumer should be able to consume my service like they consume asmx service.
I am asking this question because WCF provides additional features like security, etc. and hence the consumers should also follow the practice to communicate with the service.
Any advice is highly appreciated.
You probably want to use BasicHttpBinding in your WCF service and, although I'm not a PHP developer, I understand that PHP 5 has a SOAP library that can be used to create a service proxy based on the WSDL document exposed by the WCF service, assuming metadata exchange is enabled.
A service I have in WCF occasionally goes down due a problem with a COM component. While I am troubleshooting I would like to setup another host to make regular calls to this service to monitor availability.
It is slightly more complicated that a simple HTTP call though as the service is secured by SSL and WCF authentication (username / password). I'd also like to be able to parse successful calls to see if they return warning / fail states from my code.
Would you recommend any monitoring providers for this or is it beyond the simple monitoring they normally provide?
Regards
Ryan
You could enable WCF logging and auditing facilities either on the server or the client to produce a log of all traffic. Then you can analyze the results using the WCF Service Trace Viewer Tool provided in .NET Framework 3.0 and 3.5 SDK.
In your situation I would probably enable logging only at the message level. This will reduce the amount of information that ends up in the log file and will help you focus on analyzing the data that's actually being sent back and forth from the services.