Tag: TechEd

LeanSentry: TechEd 2013 is done!

Last week, we attended TechEd 2013 in New Orleans, and showed off LeanSentry to a crowd of Microsoft IT folks and developers. The reception was awesome! It took us a week to recover after the conference, but here is the wrapup.

Biggest take-away: everyone who runs Microsoft web apps wanted a tool like LeanSentry.

IT operation engineers, administrators, and developers all felt the pain of production troubleshooting, and wanted something that can help them diagnose production problems faster.

We spoke to hundreds of people, and asked almost everyone whether they’ve ever had to troubleshot a website hang or crash in production. Most of the time, the answer was “yes”.

We then asked, did you enjoy it? 100% of the time, the answer was “Hell no”! People told us dozens of stories of trying to catch a hang in production, and how long it took to figure out the root cause, even when Microsoft support was involved.

Then we got to hear the classic story of finger-pointing between the IT administrator that runs the production environment, and the developers that build the application. Often, the operations team didn’t have enough evidence to convince the developer that the issue was in their code … And the developer didn’t have enough information from production to reproduce the issue in the test environment.

We then showed LeanSentry’s automatic IIS/ASPNET hang diagnostics, which automatically detects hangs and instantly identifies their root cause, including blocking IIS modules, CLR threadpool exhaustion, or application code. People loved it!

The highlights

The feedback we got was pretty consistent. Everyone’s favorite things were:

1. Automatically diagnosing IIS and ASP.NET problems in production. Many people couldn’t believe that we do this at first. Many times we had to explain our Windows Server background and that Microsoft web platform development is all we do. Of course, seeing the hang diagnostic demo also helped.

2. Lightweight monitoring without profilers. IT administrators really appreciated the fact that LeanSentry uses lightweight Windows protocols like Performance counters and IIS logs to monitor the server, instead of loading application profilers. Many said “we dont want the performance monitoring tool to become the performance problem”, as we often hear from users of profiler based tools.

Many also loved how LeanSentry can be sandboxed to a separate VM, and monitor the production servers without installing anything on them. No reboots, iisresets, etc.

3. Making everything simpler. IT managers that handled web operations loved how simple the LeanSentry dashboard was, and how it was very easy to see all the requests, errors, and performance data in one place. Developers also loved aggregating the errors across Windows Server, IIS, and ASP.NET and getting all the details needed to troubleshoot the error. We heard a lot of complaints about how complicated SCOM was, and how LeanSentry dashboard was the “anti-SCOM”. The consensus was that LeanSentry complements environments that use SCOM, by providing a much simpler view to track problems and get the details to resolve them.

4. Working directly with the developer team. People loved talking directly with the founders and the developer team. Many were used to dealing with company sales people at the other booths. We loved showing everyone the Olark chat box on our site, where you can talk directly to the dev team anytime.

Top questions

The top questions people asked were:

1. How do you diagnose hangs in a lightweight way? We explained our multi-stage process for diagnosing hangs that insures lightweight monitoring, and still provides debug-level resolution for hangs. We use similar approaches for diagnosing other problems, where we first detect many potential symptoms of a problem using lightweight monitoring like performance counters, and only perform the intensive diagnostic once we know the problem already exists.

2. How is LeanSentry different from SCOM/AviCode/New Relic? In many ways! We put together a page to explain what makes LeanSentry different.

3. Can I host LeanSentry in my environment? You can’t just yet, but you will be able to later this year! We now have a beta program for people who want to help us do this. Email us for more info!

The goodies: TechEd discount, LeanSentry Robot t-shirts

For everyone who came to talk to with at TechEd, we are offering a special TechEd discount for our “Full service” plan. This is a limited time discount, so email us for details if you are looking to activate your account this month.

Also, we had a huge level of interest in the LeanSentry t-shirts. Because of this, we ran out early on the first day. If you didnt get a shirt, be sure to email us and we’ll put you on the list to get one!

Thanks and more

Thanks to everyone who came out to support us, and who talked to us at TechEd! We had a great time thanks to you, and really appreciate your support.

If you talked to us at TechEd, be sure to reach out over the next couple weeks to get the discount. You can also schedule a deep-dive demo with us to see how LeanSentry can improve your production operations.

If not, get in touch with us anyway! You can also give LeanSentry a try yourself. We are always just an IM away!

Best,
The LeanSentry Team

LeanSentry at TechEd 2013: Day 1

TechEd is awesome! Its our first major conference, and so far the reception has been great. You can really tell that LeanSentry is addressing a major pain point for pretty much everyone running the IIS/ASP.NET application stack.

TechEd is definitely more of an enterprise crowd, with attendees ranging from midsize companies to the likes of Deloitte and Verizon. However, they face many of the same problems that we see in small businesses and startups. Turns out production troubleshooting is a great equalizer 🙂

The LeanSentry TechEd booth

Things you loved!

It’s been great to get some face-to-face feedback about LeanSentry. Here are a few of the highlights that everyone absolutely loved:

1. IIS hang and crash diagnostics. This was literally jaw-dropping for some. We asked if debugging hangs in production was a problem, and you could just see the pain in people’s eyes. The best response we got was “Its the difference between a good day and a bad day”.

People just could not believe that LeanSentry could diagnose a hang automatically, and get them right to the source of the hang in a few clicks.

2. Lightweight monitoring, with no profilers / nothing to install on the production servers. This was a huge hit. It was clear that you appreciated non-intrusive monitoring that doesnt slow down your applications with a profiler.

And of course, everyone loved the LeanSentry Robot! We’ve had attendees say that it was the best t-shirt at the conference. If you didn’t get the shirt at the booth, email us and we may be able to mail you one.

Things you wanted

We’ve also gotten a good sense for what people want to see from LeanSentry. The big one was a self-hosted version of LeanSentry that can be deployed in environments compliant with PCI, HIPAA, and defense contractor requirements. We heard you loud and clear on that, and we can say that a version of self-hosted LeanSentry is in the works.

If you want to use the self-hosted version of LeanSentry, email us and we can discuss the timeframe further.

TechEd continues, so if you are there be sure to come by booth 2417 today and check us out.

You can also see all of our new features live in our demo app. See it here and sign up for the free trial!

Best,
The LeanSentry Team

Come support us at TechEd 2013 and get awesome stuff!

Are you going to TechEd 2013? So are we! Be sure to come by our booth
(#2417), try LeanSentry for yourself, and chat with our founder/dev team members.

To make things even better, we are announcing two awesome promotions:

Awesome promotion #1: Help us get the word out about LeanSentry, and walk away with a Microsoft Surface!

Want to help us get the word out about LeanSentry at TechEd? Come by our booth on the first day of the conference, and pick up our snazzy LeanSentry Robot tshirt to wear on the conference floor.

Each day you come by our booth wearing the shirt, we’ll enter you into our raffle to win one or more of our demo Microsoft Surface RTs! We’ll pick a winner on the last day of the conference and you can walk away with the a brand new Surface right then and there. We don’t have a lot of shirts, so your odds to win are pretty good 🙂 Just be sure to reserve your shirt here.

Awesome promotion #2: Come by our booth, and get an exclusive TechEd-only LeanSentry discount!

If you go to TechEd, we know that you are serious about growing and becoming better at running your Microsoft apps. One of the best ways to do that is to use LeanSentry – which is built to make you an expert at troubleshooting and tuning your web apps.

We want to help people discover how much of a difference using LeanSentry can make – so we will be giving away a HUGE one-time only discount at the conference to help you get started with LeanSentry.

We’ll announce the discount details in the week before the conference. Quantities will be limited, so make sure to register early.

 

We are super excited to meet everyone and show off LeanSentry at the conference. Be sure to come by and take advantage of these two promotions, get details here. We’ll see you at TechEd!

Best,
The LeanSentry team