ASP.NET monitoring page_load performance (without code change)

Question

What I'm looking for is some way to monitor the page_load of every page in the system to work out how long between the request and the end of the data being sent back to the user is.

I'm looking to do this 100% server side, and I don't want to make any code changes to the application code. If application code changes would be required, is there a standard place to make these? I'm thinking some kind of web.config type parameter that will log the information to a location/database. We can do the processing part, just need the raw data somehow.

The information I'd be looking to gather is:

1. Page name (including query string)
2. DateTime of the request
3. The amount of time it took
4. Any additional information about the request that we can get our hands on!

Obviously, the pre-requisite is that it shouldn't impact performance.

I'm also looking for either something low cost, or a methodology that we can develop our system with.

Additional Information: To be clearer, we have full control of the IIS and underlying operating system, however, the website application is outside of our control. We can change configuration files, but not actual code of the application.

We're using IIS 6.0 currently, however, if this kind of thing is more efficient, and/or works out of the box, with IIS 7.0/7.5 then it may speed up the move to this so happy to hear about those suggestions.

Answer 1

This isn't a WebForms concern, it's an ASP.net concern. Using either global.asax, or an IHttpModule hook into the BeginRequest/EndRequest events to track how long a request takes.

StopWatchModule.cs

class StopWatchModule: IHttpModule
{
    private Int64 _requestStartTicks; 

    public void Init(HttpApplication application)
    {
         application.Context.BeginRequest += Application_BeginRequest;
         application.Context.EndRequest += Application_EndRequest;
    }

    private void Application_BeginRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        _requestStartTicks = Stopwatch.GetTimestamp();
    }

    private void Application_EndRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        Int64 requestStopTicks = Stopwatch.GetTimestamp();

        Double requestDurationMs = (Double)(requestStopTicks - _requestStartTicks) / Stopwatch.Frequency / 1000000f; 
        /* 
           Sample output:
           Request for "~/EditCustomer.aspx" took 37 ms to complete
        */
        HttpContext context = ((HttpApplication)sender).Context;
        Logger.Info("Request for \"{0}\" to {1} ms to complete", 
              context.Request.AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath, 
              requestDurationMs.ToString("r", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture));
    }
}

Web.config

<configuration>
    <system.web>
        <httpModules>
            <add name="StopWatchModule" type="StopWatchModule" />
        </httpModules>
    </system.web>
</configuration>

I'm writing from memory so there may be errors above, but that's the idea. your log message can be as detailed as you want. and Logger is some type of logging library. I prefer log4net, but the choice is yours.

Answer 2

Can you touch global.asax? You can override Application events there for when a request is received, completed, failed, etc.

Depending on what all you need you might also try parsing IIS logs since you can add some performance metrics to that.

Answer 3

What I'm looking for is some way to monitor the page_load of every page in the system to work out how long between the request and the end of the data being sent back to the user is.

I wonder if the IIS logs' time-taken field can be of any use since it will provide you with time, IP, bytes (sent/received), etc.

See fields for additional information

Answer 4

You can always enable tracing in your web.config, with the options pageOutput = "false".

You can then go to trace.axd to view information for a specific request.

You can also do this for a specific page by setting it in your @page directive.