Q&A

Yes. Ozcode Live Debugger works in parallel with a variety of popular APMs including New Relic, Application Insights, Dynatrace and more. Ozcode’s lightweight instrumentation uses a multiplexing technique to ensure it doesn’t interfere with your APM’s instrumentation ensuring the two can work together on the same application. Your APM will provide the high-level performance monitoring, and perhaps, point you in the direction of an error. Ozcode provides the code-level visibility that lets you determine the root cause of the error.

For more information on how Ozcode works with your APM here are a few resources:

• Documentation: Using Ozcode Live Debugger with an APM.
• Blog: Azure Remote Debugging with Application Insights and Ozcode Production Debugger
• Blog: The Role of a Production Debugger in Your Enterprise Tool Stack

Yes, you’ll need to install a lightweight agent on the production machines that should work with Ozcode. The agent will attach to the process and report exceptions as they occur.

Yes, here’s how it works.

The first time an exception is thrown, the Ozcode Live Debugger agent turns on its code instrumentation. At this point, Ozcode will only provide you with the call stack. The second time the exception is thrown, the agent captures  primary debug information. You can now start debugging. You can then request a full-fidelity time-travel recording, which will be captured the following time the exception is thrown. For more details, please refer to Capturing Exceptions in the documentation.

Yes, in fact, this demo that we used in one of our webinars was written with .NET Core.

Our support for .NET Core means that the Ozcode agent can run in containers so you can debug your code whether it’s running on Windows or Linux.

Yes. To enable compliance with different privacy regulations, Ozcode Live Debugger provides a flexible mechanism to redact PII before it reaches the developer. In the Debugging screen, redacted data is masked and accompanied by a lock icon to indicate redaction.

PII redaction is configured by your organization’s Ozcode administrator and is applied at two levels. First, the Ozcode agent redacts PII before it leaves your client application. Then, Ozcode also redacts PII before displaying debug information. This ensures that if the PII redaction configuration has changed since the Ozcode agent sent telemetry data to the server, data is redacted according to the latest configuration.

To learn more, please refer to Configuring PII redaction in the Ozcode Production Debugger documentation.

A performance profiling session can help us at Ozcode identify and remediate performance issues you may have when running Ozcode Production Debugger on your systems.

How you record your performance profiling session depends on how your system is deployed. The sections below describe how to record a performance profiling session for a deployment on:

• a VM on IIS
• an Azure App Service

Recording a performance profiling session in a VM on IIS

You can record a performance profiling session in a VM on IIS with PerfView as follows:

1. Download PerfView to your virtual machine
2. Run Perfview as Admin
3. In the Collect menu, choose Collect
   
   Make sure Merge, Zip, and Thread Time options are checked.
   
   
   
4. Run the scenario with the performance problem, or still just let it run for a minute if it’s already in progress.
5. Stop collecting and wait several minutes for the snapshot to merge and zip.
   
6. An etl.zip fil will be created. Please send us this file.

Creating a performance snapshot in an Azure App Service

There are two ways to create a performance snapshot in an Azure App Service:

• Using Kudu services
• Using Application Insights

Both of these methods create a .diagsession file which can be analyzed by PerfView.

Using Kudu services

1. Enter Kudu services for your App Service. The simplest method is to enter the link, .scm.azurewebsites.net for your site. It’s also accessible from Azure Portal under [Your App Service] in Advanced Tools | Go.
2. Go to the Process Explorer and choose Start Profiling near the process of your application. Make sure to choose the correct process—it will be under w3wp, but without an scm tag.
   
   Click on Stop profiling when done
   
   This will automatically download a .diagsession file which contains the snapshot.

Using Application Insights

1. Go to the Application Insights resource in your Azure Portal
2. Go to Performance and click on the Configure Profiler button
   
3. Click on Profile Now. This will create a performance snapshot file, but it but it takes about 20 minutes for the file to be fully populated and ready
4. The performance snapshot file is eventually accessible in the same Performance page. This is the file you should send us.

Ozcode Live Debugger is a separate product, although it does reuse quite a bit of code from Ozcode Visual Studio extension, so users familiar with our Visual Studio extension will feel right a home using the Live Debugger. Ozcode Visual Studio extension focuses on developers debugging code locally, and the Live Debugger aims to provide a similar experience for remote debugging, whether on a QA machine, on Staging, and, of course, in Production.

It’s also important to emphasize that Ozcode Live Debugger also works in on-premises deployments.

For more information on deployment options, please refer to Supported Platforms in the Ozcode Production Debugger documentation.

Ozcode supports all popular deployment targets in the cloud and on a desktop machine as follows:

• Microsoft Azure – Windows
  • Azure App Service
  • Service Fabric
  • Azure Functions
  • Virtual Machine (IIS & Windows Services)
• AWS – Windows
  • Virtual Machine (IIS & Windows Services)
• Other cloud providers – Windows
  • Virtual Machine (IIS & Windows Services)
  • Desktop (WPF and WinForms)
• Enterprise data center – Windows
  • Virtual Machine (IIS & Windows Services)
  • Desktop (WPF and WinForms)
• All platforms – Linux
  • Docker

To get started with any of the supported deployment options, please refer to Getting Started in the Ozcode Live Debugger documentation.

For detailed instructions on how to install the Ozcode agent for your deployment, please refer to Installing an Agent in the Ozcode Live Debugger documentation.

The Ozcode Production Debugger agent was designed to provide full-fidelity time-travel debugging without hampering performance. It uses a self-throttling mechanism that monitors CPU, network and memory usage:

• CPU will never exceed 3%, otherwise the code instrumentation is temporarily switched off
• Network usage is capped at a maximum of 10MB per hour
• Memory usage is negligible since the agent only uses lightweight instrumentation to record the code execution flow of an error.

Ozcode shows all exceptions in the applications that contain user code. This includes failed HTTP requests, application crashes, failed tasks, and caught exceptions. Exceptions occurring and swallowed in ASP.NET Framework (or a different framework) will not be reported.

In addition, Ozcode shows all logged errors. Anything logged with log.Error or log.Fatal will report an error. Most major C# logging frameworks are supported out of the box. The Ozcode agent will detect the platform you are using and integrate with it automatically.

Ozcode supports any application type running on top of the .NET Framework or .NET Core. This includes web applications, web API, desktop applications, and Windows services. Ozcode supports all versions of ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET WebAPI, ASP.NET MVC, WCF, WPF and WinForms. Content