Is there a service for monitoring secured WCF endpoints in the same way that HTTP monitoring services do?

Question

Hi all,

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

Answer 1

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.