Tools to monitor and debug SaaS Services

Question

What tools will come in handy to debug and monitor SaaS services built on WCF in production environment ?

FYI - No access to the actual server whatsoever. No remoting in, and no access to the file system.

Answer 1

What exactly do you want to monitor? If you only care about availability then good old ping might be enough :)

Answer 2

There are dozens of 'dotcom-monitors' (eg site24x7.com) but they can only monitor parameters that are publicly available, like site uptime, response times etc.

If you want to monitor memory usage and other parameters known only from 'inside', then you have two choices: either install some monitoring agent on a server (in most cases it would be a pain).

You can also send 'signals' from your code to some external event handling and notification service. I recommend AlertGrid (http://alert-grid.com) for the latter purpose it is very flexible and extremely easy to integrate.

AlertGrid doesn't require installation, access to the file system etc. it just gathers data you send and allows to build some notification rules. Examples:

1. you can send some parameter like memory usage and built rule 'if memory_usage > threshold -> send SMS to admin'
2. you can send data related to your applicatioin. If you have application proceeding orders, you can send number of processed orders in the signal and build notification rules around that
3. If you have some logic trigerred periodically (cron, windows service) you can send signal each time your logic is executed to check if it is executed on a scheduled basis.

(I am a developer in AlertGrid's team, in case of any question, please feel free to ask.)