Channel 9 - Entries tagged with Diagnostics

TechNet Radio: Cloud Innovators – Monitor Your Applications with Foglight for Windows Azure Applications

ChrisCaldwell, TechNet Radio, Kevin Remde — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 12:00:15 GMT

Like what you heard? Try Windows Azure for FREE and enjoy the freedom to use your preferred OS, language, database or tool. Windows Azure can help you deploy sites to a highly scalable environment, deploy and run virtual machines, and create highly scalable application in a rich PaaS environment. Give it a try!

_________________

Abstract:
Kevin Remde, welcomes Douglas Chrystall, Chief Architect at Dell Software to the show as they discuss Foglight for Windows Azure applications – a new product offering from Dell which helps monitor applications built on the Azure platform. Tune in as they chat about this solution which can provide diagnostics and improve your applications performance quality.

If you're interested in learning more about the products or solutions discussed in this episode, click on any of the below links for free, in-depth information:

Resources:

Websites & Blogs:

Videos:

Virtual Labs:

MSDN Virtual Labs: Windows Azure

Follow @technetradio
Become a Fan @ facebook.com/MicrosoftTechNetRadio
Subscribe to our podcast via iTunes, Stitcher, or RSS

Canada Does Windows Azure: Agile Business Cloud Solutions

Jonathan Rozenblit — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 03:37:44 GMT

Read the full post >>

Host Jonathan Rozenblit is always on the search for stories of Canadian developers who have either built new applications using Windows Azure services or have migrated existing applications to Windows Azure. Canada Does Windows Azure shares their stories.

This is the story of Agile Business Cloud Solutions.

JEF KING
Jef has worked in the software industry for twelve years. Over this time he has experienced a range of responsibilities in various industries. His passion for technology and motivating teams has kept his drive and focus strong. Early on in his career he showed an entrepreneurial spirit, starting multiple small companies. He departed from this to learn more about the software industry by working with larger companies, such as Microsoft. These diverse experiences have given a very unique perspective on teams and software engineering. Since moving back to Vancouver he has built several highly productive software development teams, and inspired others to try similar techniques.

JAIME BUEZA
Multi-discipline software engineer with experience in technical leadership, front-end architecture, user experience design, performance optimization, platform integration (Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Omniture, WebTrends), mobile web application development, product management, and open source initiatives. Specializing in HTML/CSS/JavaScript and passionate about making the web a better place for everyone by building tools, helping developer communities, and illustrating a shared vision of an open platform to users, developers, designers, and stakeholders.

AGILE BUSINESS CLOUD SOLUTIONS
We bring developers cloud-based performance analysis and real-time application monitoring systems. We are dedicated to helping you transition new or existing workloads onto Windows Azure. Our open-source initiatives help developers quickly and easily get into the cloud and start leveraging some of the amazing new technologies that are offered.

Windows HPC Server 2008R2 Monitoring and Management Part One

Wenming Ye — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 04:04:58 GMT

Kathy Palmer, Lead Program Manager of the HPC Team, presents the management and monitoring enhancements released with R2. The notion of personal supercomputing is a core operational paradigm that is rapidly evolving in the numerical computing ecosphere. Various visualization aids, such as heat maps, provide administrators with hierarchical and aggregate views that simplify utilization, health management, and troubleshooting.

Windows HPC Server 2008R2 Monitoring and Management Part Two

Wenming Ye — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 04:04:13 GMT

Part Two explores cluster management and demonstrates how major administrative tasks are performed from a single integrated console: Configuration & Deployment, Monitoring, Node Management, Job Management, Reporting, and Diagnostics.

Diagnostics and reporting in Windows HPC Server 2008 R2

Wenming Ye — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 04:02:38 GMT

Rae Wang, Senior Program Manager on the Windows HPC Team enumerates the diagnostics and reporting features available in Windows HPC Server 2008 R2. Microsoft designed comprehensive diagnostics to assist with granular troubleshooting, empowering administrators, ISVs, and IHVs to address failures. Rae gives a walk-through on the UI and discusses Extensibility features implemented in the Diagnostic console and Reporting features. HPC exposes reporting data, making it available for data warehousing, manipulation with Excel, or other authoring tools. For this purpose, the available data interfaces are Powershell and database views.

LM Webcast: Windows HPC V3 (or Windows HPC Server 2008 R2) Diagnostics Extensibility

Wenming Ye — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 06:02:00 GMT

When working with an HPC cluster- including thousands of machines and many different hardware components and software packages- errors and failures are unavoidable. As a result, most HPC administrators spend a large majority of their time on diagnostics. Windows HPC Server 2008, the current version, offers 16 built-in system tests and a GUI and scripting interface to run tests, receive and clear alerts, view results and preserve result history. In the latest release, Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, this diagnostics platform is becoming extensible: administrators and partners can create custom diagnostic tests to run in the same way as the built-in tests. This allows cluster administrators to troubleshoot more easily the custom and non-Microsoft software or hardware added to their HPC cluster.

This session will cover:

- What you can do with the extensible diagnostics framework

- How to create a custom diagnostic test, add it to WPHC, run it and view results

- How to aggregate test results for a large scale cluster so that administrator can easily spot the outliers

- Ideas for tests to help validating or troubleshooting ISV apps

Azure Miniseries #4: Monitoring Applications

Brian — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:47:00 GMT

In this screencast, we'll take a look at monitoring Azure applications by capturing event logs and performance counters. We'll also look at using powershell to deploy and configure applications using the management API.

Finally, we'll take a sneak peek at Azure Diagnostics Manager, a tool from Cerebrata that allows you explore event logs and look at performance counters visually.

For more info, visit my blog at http://blog.structuretoobig.com.

Windows HPCS 2008R2 Beta1:Diagnostics

Wenming Ye — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 01:47:00 GMT

Administrators of HPC setups know the headaches involved when something goes wrong on the cluster. To make things easier for cluster admins, the Diagnostics panel in the Cluster Manager on HPC Server 2008 R2 beta1 provides a variety of tests to help admins quickly figure out the cause of an error. New to version 3 of HPC Server product is the ability to add custom tests to the Diagnostics panel. This video shows you how to add your own tests using any tool or scripting language that can be run from the command line, and easily see the results.

Melur Raghuraman: Inside Windows 7 - Diagnostics and Troubleshooting

Charles — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:41:00 GMT

Windows Development Manager Melur Raghuraman and team have taken troubleshooting and diagnostics to a whole new level in Windows 7. For one thing, Windows 7 uses managed code "natively" as PowerShell has become the de facto language used for creating diagnostic algorithms that live inside of diagnostic packages. So, when something goes wrong eventually a PowerShell script runs and diagnosis happens.

You've probably already noticed the information flag that appears in your task bar notification area when Windows wants to tell you something important. Well, in order for Windows 7 to inform you of a problem and its solution it must first diagnose the issue and collect troubleshooting steps. Sometimes, and more so than ever before, Windows will simply fix the problem and let you know about it - this is a trend that will only become more common over time and with each iteration of Windows going forward. This troubleshooting fabric has both client and server (cloud) components.

How does this all work, exactly? What's the story?

Tune in. Lots to learn here. The new troubleshooting and diagnostics capabilities in Windows 7 marks a signficant step forward in the evolution of Windows supportability. Of course, you, the human user, can write your own diagnostic scripts - so you'll be more efficient when you need to diganosis and then fix some computer problem.

Michael Fortin: Windows 7 Efficiency

Charles — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:42:00 GMT

The Windows 7 project involved very efficient software engineering planning and execution. It is no surprise that an equivalent level of efficiency exists throughout the OS (efficiency in how the OS deals with faults, threads, memory management, power management, process management, window management, graphics, audio, local search, diagnostics, and on and on - truly excellent, and efficient, engineering).

Michael Fortin is a Distinguished Engineer in the Windows Core Operating System Division. His team builds the technologies that help make Windows 7 reliable, stable and performant, which are core ingredients in any highly efficient general purpose operating system. You'll hear us talk about Windows 7 as a very efficient general purpose operating system quite a bit over the coming months. In fact, if I had to sum up Windows 7 in one word it would be Efficient.

Michael's team also builds the troubleshooting and diagnostics systems in Windows, including the internal mechanisms that construct fault data packages and sends them to cloud-based components which receive data from millions of clients running Windows 7. Michael's team is a global team - engineers are located in multiple places around the world including a stellar team of engineers located in Beijing, China (you'll meet them in the future right here on C9).

You may remember Michael from his last interview on Channel 9 that covered his work on Vista's SuperFetch and ReadyBoost technologies. Yep, these great technologies are alive and well in Windows 7 and have evolved to meet the needs of the evolving system and help add to the overall efficiency of Windows. (There, I wrote "efficiency" again...)

Over the past year or so, Michael's team has received, analyzed and acted upon a very large amount of data sent from Windows 7 Beta and RC running on a variety of PCs with a variety of hardware and software configurations in place. This data was used to construct new system features, like the Fault Tolerant Heap, and to engineer updates to existing mechanisms to make them more robust or performant or reliable or stable... You will meet some of his team here on C9 in the future and we will dig into many of the mechanisms Michael touched on in this conversation (Fault Tolerant Heap, Troubleshooting and Diagnostics, etc).

Here, Michael and I chat about the work his team has done, the engineering philosophy that has driven efficiency into Windows at all levels (from the kernel to the shell), the knowledge his team has gained about how Windows is used in the wild, what the most common problems have been and the solutions that are based on this important telemetry data. So, for all of you out there who chose to send fault data from your PC to Microsoft - THANK YOU. You truly have helped, in a fundamental way, to make Windows 7 the most efficient general purpose operating system from Microsoft to date. Yeah. True story.

Enjoy.

OSIsoft: Real-Time Monitoring and Analytics - The Power of PI, Part 2

Charles — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 17:54:18 GMT

Global carbon regulation is arguably the largest risk and opportunity most corporations will face in the beginning of the 21st century. It has been estimated that turnover in the global carbon marketplace could exceed a trillion dollars in the next five to ten years. Voluntary and mandatory reporting protocols are emerging. How can an organization know its true carbon footprint and exposure? What options are available to manage corporate carbon risk? What impact can energy efficiency programs have on reducing a corporation’s carbon footprint? Read whitepaper

OSIsoft’s real-time monitoring solutions help companies improve the overall energy efficiency of their organization while simultaneously reducing its carbon footprint. In fact, Microsoft uses OSIsoft PI infrastructure for their Data Center Energy management. Also at a recent, OSIsoft user group meeting, Kodak presented on how they were able conserve energy and reduce their operational costs by using OSIsoft software.

Several case studies exist on OSIsoft’s website which can be viewed at http://www.osisoft.com/Resources/Case%20Studies

Here, we continue our discussion with some of the developers who make PI. OSISoft's founder and CEO, Dr. Pat Kennedy, starts off this part with some very interesting example of systems that use PI. I bet you wouldn't think ice breaking ships in the Artic would rely on PI...

Cast of characters:

Prabal Acharya, ex-OSIsoft-customer to ex-engineering to now Director, Microsoft Global Alliance
Alex Zheng, Team Lead, PI Server & Analytics
Jason King, Senior Developer, PI Clients
Denis Vacher, Lead Developer, PI Server Core and Niner
Dr. Pat Kennedy – Founder and CEO
Mark Hughes – CTO

See Part 1

HanselMinutes on 9 - #2 - Weapons and Debugging the .NET Runtime

Scott Hanselman, Rory — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 17:03:41 GMT

Very few Channel 9 videos begin with the firing of a trebuchet.

This is one of those videos.

Scott and I barged in on Vance Morrison, an architect on the .NET Runtime team, and spent some quality time with him assaulting a wall (we won - the wall didn't even put up a fight) and then talking about Vance's job, which turns out to be quite the challenge.

Vance didn't have much time, so Scott and I were very thankful for the few minutes we got, but Scott was able to dig right down to the interesting stuff quickly. Scott's good at that

There are more HanselMinutes on 9 videos coming. It seems people dig these things, so we're going to release a few more from the first session, and then put together another set, most likely at Mix.

Thanks again to Scott Hanselman for doing this, and to Carl Franklin for letting us use the "HanselMinutes" name.

Windows Vista Diagnostics: Moving closer to a self-healing OS

Charles — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 16:39:00 GMT

Sometimes problems occur (system or application level exceptions happen, applications might crash, hard disks fail) in complicated systems like modern personal computers.

In Vista, the system is capable of understanding a wide variety of problems as they occur and, in many cases, fix them without disrupting the user. In certain cases, the system is unable to automatically repair a given problem so Vista will inform the user of actions to take to solve the problem.

Even for hardware critical failures like a hard disk crash, Vista will help the user understand the problem and guide them through a set of steps to get to a working solution (in the case of hard disk failure, obviously the solution is back your data up! Vista will actually run you through a helpful backup "wizard" in this case, but you'll need to get some hardware to store your data...).

Meet Melur Raghuraman, Development Manager, Matthew Kerner, Lead PM, and Jeff Meng, Development Lead. These are some of the people responsible for making Vista our most reliable OS to date. They are members of the Windows Reliability team.

You will meet more of the Reliabiliy People as Vista Week continues here on Channel 9.

Matt Pietrek - Visual Studio Diagnostics

Charles — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 18:11:33 GMT

Meet Matt Pietrek, Architect in Visual Studio's Team System technology group, specifically focusing on profiling and diagnostics in Visual Studio. Here, Matt tells us about some really interesting work he's doing in the diagnostics space. We also dig into diagnostics generally and the challenge of diagnosing problems that occur in complex systems.

Stay tuned for more in the future. This is a just a taste of what may come for you in Team System diagnostics...

Matt Pietrek - Visual Studio Diagnostics

Charles — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 18:11:05 GMT