How can I monitor ASP.NET MVC server load and performance without access to IIS log files

Question

I need to monitor the load and performance on my ASP.NET MVC web service application. The application is hosted on AppHarbor and behind a load balancer. Currently just running 2 web workers. Some of the data we're trying to collect:

• average/peak load in hits per second
• min/max/average request processing time

AppHarbor has been promising access to IIS logs for some time, but as far as I can tell it has yet to materialize. I'm thinking of just rolling my own ASP.NET filter or something to log each request to a database, but I'm a little worried of impacting performance negatively by introducing a database write on each request.

This is not a very high traffic application at the moment. Hard to tell with no logs, but my guess is on the order of a few hundred thousand requests per month.

Are there any off the shelf packages I should consider? Is it worth considering some kind of cloud based logging/analysis?

Answer 1

You should probably take a look at the New Relic add-on. AppHarbor has a bunch of other monitoring add-ons that might work for your use. Hosted Graphite is another one.