Self-aware applications: automatic production monitoring

The road to zen winds through self-monitoring applications, which can reduce the time and effort in diagnosing and correcting production issues. In this talk, we will see how modern Windows applications can self-monitor, self-diagnose, and potentially self-recover without needing an external monitoring agent or a brute-force restarting watchdog. By harnessing the power of ETW for low-level accurate monitoring, Windows performance counters for zero-overhead statistics, and the CLRMD library for inspecting your own threads, heap objects, and locks, you can take your applications one step closer to self-awareness. This will be illustrated through a series of demos: automatic CPU profiling and pinpointing the busy threads and stacks; automatic GC monitoring, including object allocations; automatic heap analysis to reveal unraveling memory leaks; and more. At the end of the talk, you will be equipped with tools and techniques for implementing self-monitoring in your own applications.