Here is a typical scenario. You have an application and stuff starts running slowly. You as a developer know that the section that is running slowly does a ton of things under the hood. For example, an add to cart functionality may do the following things during a transaction
- Do some database calls
- Call third party services like Avalara/Vertex to calculate tax
- Call third party service like Authorize.Net for credit card processing
- Call some shipping service.
- Call some inventory service.
The list goes on an on. Your job is to find out why the heck is the add to cart process running slow. Given all the external calls and the amount of paths through code that can be a daunting task.
One really nice tool out there that can make this easy on Azure is the Azure Service Profiler. I have used tools like dynaTrace and NewRelic in the past. They are slick, great tools that make it very easy to hone in on bottlenecks and performance issues. The term you hear a lot is “Hot Spots”. Well Azure Service Profiler is very similar to these tools and the make it dead simple to set this up. I configured this within minutes on an Azure App Service I have running and very quickly make some “Hot Spot” discoveries. This allows me to focus in on where to focus efforts for performance tuning. Great!!
Here is a nice video about Azure Service Profiler