Here is a typical scenario…You have been developing web sites for a really long time and hosting those websites on some type of managed hosting provider (i.e Rackspace etc). Invariably things happen and when they do there is comfort in knowing that when stuff hits the fan, you can log onto the VMs to troubleshoot. Now with Azure, and in particular PaaS, that voice in the back of your head is saying something like ” I don’t know man, not being able to log onto a server to troubleshoot things….that is a bit frightening”. In the end this fear, although somewhat justified, is actually not such a scary thing. This is all because Azure provides a suite of tools that can really alleviate those fears. In fact, PaaS takes away some fears, fears like…”are the latest patches on the server?”
One such tool is called Kudo and with Kudo you can perform all kinds of judo ( I know..I know pretty lame right ). In all seriousness though, Kudo is a nice tool and frankly provides a lot of the functionality you typically need/use anyway when logging onto VMs to troubleshoot. Let me just mention some key features of Kudo here so you can put this in your bag of developer karate moves.
First, to get to Kudo you simply browse to your site and add the scm phrase to your URL. For example, https://{site name}.scm.azurewebsites.net. That will present you with this UI.
The next few sections call out some key features you can leverage using Kudo
The Environment
The environment section give you access to a lot of valuable information such as appsettings, connection strings, environment variables etc.
Diagnostic Information
From the Tools-> Diagnostic Dump you can get access to your IIS log information. The action will allow for you to download a .zip of the IIS log data. From here you can use your tool of choice to analyze the logs. There are a ton of them out there
Running Processes
Click Process Explorer on the Kudu top navigation bar to see a stripped-down, web-based version of Windows Task Manager. This is a read-only view of your PaaS VM’s running processes. It is mainly useful to see if any, and which, processes consume too many resources in your web app. This is a very common scenario and usually a first step someone may take when logging onto a server to troubleshoot issues.
Diagnostic Console
This is a case when not having access to a server can be a bit scary. Luckily the Debug Console offers use two sections called CMD and Powershell in which you can run either cmdlets or PowerShell scripts
Site Extensions
The site extensions offers us the ability to add functionality to the virtual machine. Examples of functions include
- Agents like anti malware and monitoring
- Backup administration
If you browse to site extensions you can see a gallery of available extensions. There are a ton of them.
At the end of the day Kudo offers of a ton of functionality that really makes the case for needing full access to a server less and less of a requirement.