Comment by btb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btb | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting product, considering trying it out. A few questions

1. I gather from reading the How-it-works pages that the monitoring service is not invasive. How about the optional agent, how invasive is that and does it carry extra performance impact? I cant see anywhere explained what it does, and how much of the functionality that depends on it

2. On your demo site, in one of the alerts you slow causes of slow queries. It says "SQL query "dbo.spSlowNumbers" caused slow responses on "/Profile/Save". How does your service know the name of the stored proc? Does it hook into SQL server calls or?

3. Is it safe to install on a production webserver? Was thinking we would try it out on one of our 5 webservers.

4. Is it easy to remove the monitoring service+agent again if we dont like it?

Thanks

Hi, founder here.

1. You are absolutely right, the agent is an optional component. Without the agent, you get most of LeanSentry's monitoring features without having to install ANYTHING on your production servers.

2. We know the name of the stored procedure/SQL query from monitoring ADO.NET activity externally via ETW, the high speed event tracing in windows. We do not actually connect to your SQL server for this.

3. We worked hard to make sure LeanSentry is safe for production environments (thats what its for). We also designed it so it can be completely sandboxed in production. Most importantly, it will never load anything into your application directly, unlike debuggers or profilers, and has no chance of crashing your application.

The agent adds some deeper diagnostic capabilities, including SQL query/IIS module/REST call monitoring, CPU profiling, etc. It does have a bit more overhead since you have to install it on the actual production server, but we worked hard to make sure it keeps a low footprint (and even shuts itself down if something goes wrong causing higher utilization).

4. You can remove the monitoring service and the agent anytime. We provide the configuration script for servers as a batch file so its easy to see the changes we make.

These are great questions - if you have more, hit us up on chat on our website!

Best, Mike

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