You may have noticed that we’ve been very quiet in the last year. The reason: as a small team, we found the initial demand for LeanSentry a bit overwhelming. This made it difficult to focus on building the kind of product we envisioned.
So, we decided to take a year to innovate our product, and deliver the kind of experience that our customers wanted.
Today, we are back with a brand new www.leansentry.com and whole new generation of our service.
What does LeanSentry do?
LeanSentry uses expert analysis techniques, many developed at Microsoft, to give you deeper insight into your web apps.
We automatically analyze IIS and ASP.NET performance, troubleshoot website hangs, tune .NET CPU and memory usage, troubleshoot errors, and much more.
The best part? It’s lightweight, cannot affect your applications, and can run alongside any existing APM or monitoring tool.
What’s different about LeanSentry?
In short, everything!
We have a brand new, real-time interface that makes it easy to access information with just a few clicks.
Our diagnostics have been upgraded to be way easier, and give you lot a lot more insight into your stack’s performance.
We have a simpler, faster deployment that lets you add LeanSentry to your production servers, Windows Azure or Amazon EC2 in less than 5 minutes, with no restarts or iisreset.
Here are some highlights for a quick glance:
Use hang diagnostics to see what causes IIS & ASP.NET performance problems in your site.
Quickly resolve memory leaks and tune the application’s memory usage.
Automatically analyze CPU usage if your website consumes high CPU.
Get code-level details to tune application CPU usage.
Identify blocking application functions that cause hangs and slow requests.
Detect most production problems and get the diagnostics to resolve them quickly.
Give me!
If you’ve tried LeanSentry a while back, you simply must see it again.
If you have not, this is a good time to check it out! Head over to www.leansentry.com and sign up for the free trial to see for yourself.
To all our customers and everyone that supported us so far, thank you! We hope the new service makes your life that much better. Stay tuned for a lot more about the new product, our story, and much more in the coming weeks!
LeanSentry’s mission is to make you an expert on the Microsoft web stack … and help you catch & solve everyday application problems without spending hours troubleshooting. Last month, we worked hard to roll out several new features that do exactly that!
If you are running web applications on the Microsoft web platform, definitely give LeanSentry a try. Check out the live demo and try it free in your app.
Here are some of the new things you get:
1. Smarter alerts (like you’ve always wanted!)
Most monitoring tools have alerts to notify you when problems happen, so you can respond and fix them. Unfortunately, most tools we’ve used have the same challenges when it comes to alerts: they make you work to create custom alert thresholds, then swarm you with alerts for things you don’t care about, or worse yet, miss important problems. The signal to noise ratio is so hard to get right, and causes alerts to lose their value and just get ignored.
So, we built a better alert system: one that acts more like a human performance expert that you hired to watch your servers and apps for you. This expert respects your time and only tells you about things it knows are important to you.
Each LeanSentry alert is custom designed by us to highlight an interesting condition, such as a server being overloaded to a point of bad performance. Each alert also automatically determines whether its important enough to be sent to you. For example, a High CPU alert will only be important if happens on a server you consider important, or if the CPU usage is statistically abnormal high given prior history on that server. High CPU by itself is not considered important if the server usually exhibits that behavior (we run our system in the cloud, and we are happy when our cloud instances are well utilized as long as they dont perform poorly).
This way, while you can easily see and diagnose all High CPU alerts in the dashboard, you will only get an email whenever a High CPU alert really demands your attention.
When you log into the dashboard to view an alert, we’ll show you its entire history across all the affected servers/urls/etc. Then, we’ll automatically identify the root causes of the problem, (e.g. identifying the errors for failed requests on a URL, or the specific processes, services, websites, and even functions that consumed CPU for the High CPU alert):
With 1 email and 3 clicks, you’ll see only the alerts you care about, get the entire picture, and identify the exact root causes. Done!
2. Important errors, automatically identified.
Most apps have a lot of errors. Some errors happen a lot (404 on favico.ico), but are not really interesting. Other errors happen rarely, but are very interesting (IIS worker process crash). Its very time consuming to wade through all the errors in the app to find the ones that are important enough to investigate.
LeanSentry now will automatically flag errors you should take a look at, in a daily email report as well as whenever you look at the error page. Flagged errors include spiking errors, errors that are new for the application or on a specific URL, errors that have high impact, and so on:
3. Server groups, and server overload diagnostics.
LeanSentry now allows you track server performance as a group, and quickly diagnose server overload that leads to bad performance.
When you click a server, you can see a detailed breakdown of all its resources (CPU, RAM, Disk, Network), and whether the server is bottlenecking on any of them:
Then, select a resource and we’ll tell you exactly who caused the overload – including your processes, services, and websites on your server.
And more good stuff
If that wasnt enough, we also released a number of other things that make your job easier:
Multiple user accounts and sharing. Create accounts for your team members and share links for guest access.
Better URL folding. Automatically group URLs into meaningful groups.
ASP error support. Expose detailed error messages (with line numbers) for Classic ASP errors.
If you are running ASP.NET or any web application on IIS, you gotta start using LeanSentry! You’ll be amazed with how much time you’ll save, how much insight you’ll gain, and how much easier it will be to keep your web applications running.
Also, right now is a great time to become an early adopter. Whenever you want, you can chat directly with the founders and the development team, and give us feedback that might just end up in the next build.
