AppFabric Service Monitoring - Troubleshooting

The dashboard in Appfabric is a huge promise but when I first tested it it just did not work.

It took me quite some time to figure out the problem and I would like to share that knowledge.

Well what i did was simple: I created a simple WCF service using VS 2010, created a deployment package and deployed it to AppFabric. Then I called the service using WcfTestClient.exe and expected to see monitoring information (number of calls, exceptions thrown etc) but… NADA the Dashboard was empty.

The solutions is… Application Server Event Collector !

This service is responsible top collect the ETW monitoring and update the database the Dashboard reads from. The Application Server Event Collector service  was down.

The minute I started it the dashboard came to life.

Hope this will help someone…