Getting the ETW messages for a live running instance of a Service Fabric application

As our company has recently discovered, it would be very handy to have a live running stream of diagnostic from a live running Service Fabric application when one is trying to figure out why a Service won't start.

This docs.microsoft.com article provides a handy way to enable the log streaming feature in Visual Studio for a live running service in the same manner as one would get when debugging the Service Fabric Application in your local cluster.

Enabling tests and tracking in the "Diagnostics" tab for the "Message Queueing" node in Computer Management on Windows

Thanks to a coworker, I finally know how to enable the Diagnostics for MSMQ in Computer Management on Windows so that I can better diagnose and track issues for working with MSMQ.

See this. To find it on Google, search for this: "site:msdn.microsoft.com Enable Route Tracking and Test Messages" and also see this post from the MSMQ Mighty Hero, John Breakwell.

Logging your application with App Insights instead of Windows Azure Diagnostics

We've recently started deploying applications to Microsoft Azure. Unfortunately, we don't use Cloud Apps for our web apps, and instead use MSDeploy on the command line to enable automated deployment. Consequently, we don't have any .csdef files in which to implement Windows Azure Diagnostics (WAD).

Fortunately, there's a suitable replacement for applications in Azure App Service (rather than Cloud Services): Application Insights. Not only does this provide a TraceListener for tracing your application, but also provides a whole suite of other useful diagnostics, making this something that you should really be using anyway.  Using the links here and here, I was able to get up to speed with App Insights within an hour and a half, and implement a working solution for our application.