The .NET Platform
Development Tools
COM & COM+
Data Access
Web Development
XML Technologies
Windows Servers
Wireless & Mobile
Security issues
Design & Process
Career Development
Analysis & Comment
Disposable Objects
We found this book useful!
You are not logged in: login here to access all areas.
It's a bugs life
How Identify Software integrated its AppSight solution into both Visual Studio Team System and Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 to provide complete lifecycle management of application problems. Matt Nicholson talks to the company's marketing vice president Lori Wizdo.
Author: Matt Nicholson
Last updated: Jul 2005
Integration with VSTS
According to Gartner, 40 percent of a developer’s time is spent solving application problems. As Identify’s marketing vice president Lori Wizdo explains, Identify has realised that dealing with bugs is a lifecycle issue: “The further you are in the lifecycle, the harder and more costly it is to execute the problem resolution process, because there are more organisations and entities involved. When you’re solving problems in the development phase it’s just you the developer; if you’re in the QA test phase, it’s the developer and the QA organisation; and then when you’re solving problems in production you have the help desk and IT operations as well.”
The process itself is pretty simple, but an inordinate amount of time can be spent communicating the problem, and trying to recreate it. Identify commissioned some research in 2004 which discovered that, on average, teams attempt to recreate a situation seven times before they get it right, and that 80 percent of the overall time taken to resolve a problem is spent trying to pinpoint the root cause. As Lori says: “This is an extremely manual, iterative and error-prone process.” That’s where Identify’s AppSight product comes in, automating the gathering, communication and analysis of the information about the problem.
Core to Identify’s solution is the AppSight Black Box. This is a small software module that sits in the memory of the target machine, performing much the same function as a flight recorder. The Black Box can be configured to capture a wide variety of information ranging from database calls, Web service calls, file accesses and network operations to .NET function calls and parameter values, user key strokes and video-style capture of the user’s screen.
Exactly what is recorded is controlled by Recording Profiles. You can set up multiple Recording Profiles that can be changed on the fly, without having to restart the application or server. This means, for example, that the Black Box can be configured to go from a very light profile to a much more extensive profile once it encounters a problem.
A common strategy is to deploy the Black Box with the application so that it can sit silently on a server or an end user’s machine, ready to be activated remotely when a problem occurs. According to Lori, “One of the unique things about our product is just how low the impact of the Black Box is when monitoring and recording production applications.”
Black Box recordings are played back and analysed using the AppSight Console. This supports distributed applications, so users can follow transactions between servers and clients, and allows you to compare application and system configuration so you can work out why something works on one machine and not on another. You can also replay recordings at the code level so you can watch what happens as each line of code is executed. Everything recorded is time-stamped and synchronized so that you can find out what was happening at one level when something else was happening at another level.
When it came to integration with Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), Lori states “our fundamental philosophy was that VSTS will be the user interface for the functionality of AppSight.” Identify is integrating AppSight into all three of the VSTS editions. Users of the Testers edition are presented with a toolbar that allows them to control the AppSight Black Box. AppSight recordings can be attached to any Work Items the tester creates, and will be stored in the Team Foundation Server alongside the Black Box Recording Profiles. When the Work Item is opened up in the Developers edition of VSTS, the developer is presented with all the tools necessary get a complete picture of what happened from the AppSight Black Box recording.
Lori adds: “Think of the time saved for the QA person who no longer has to manually document the problem, or for the developer who no longer has to try and recreate the problem, because he’s got all the data he needs right there. What’s more, it’s as seamlessly integrated as the tools that are built into VSTS.”
AppSight also integrates with Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 which means that when the application is deployed, the same Black Box is used to capture data in the production environment. When a problem occurs, the Black Box sends an alert to the Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 operator console and automatically stores full problem data, linked to a VSTS Work Item. Developers can then retrieve the log from the Team Foundation Server and start looking for the cause of the problem.
Furthermore, the configuration of the application can be validated against the Software Definition Model (SDM) using the Architect edition of VSTS to determine if the root cause is a configuration problem: “What we add is the ability to compare the actuality with the original design.”
Identify is working closely with Microsoft to improve AppSight’s integration with all pre-release versions of VSTS. The company plans to release its integration modules at the same time as the release of VSTS.
Click here for our Privacy Statement. Copyright © Matt Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced without the prior consent of the copyright holder.
Extending Visual Studio Team System Rob Straight from Compuware discusses DevPartner Studio
