Implementing Health Checks in ASP.NET Core

Published 5 years ago

Being able to monitor your ASP.NET Core web applications and APIs and detect any issues early on is crucial in ensuring your sites are up and running and in a healthy state. In a previous article I talked about creating a custom health check solution for ASP.NET Framework applications. In this article I'll show you how to leverage the built-in Health Check framework available for ASP.NET Core applications. You may want to check out the previous article to better understand health checks and why they are useful. And seeing the custom solution for the .NET Framework may have you appreciate the built-in ASP.NET Core functionality even more. In a future article I'll dive a little deeper into some existing third-party health checks that make monitoring your sites and services super easy and show you how to build your own health checks and plug them into the system.

Improving your ASP.NET Core site's e-mailing capabilities

Published 5 years ago

Many websites depend heavily on e-mail: they send account confirmation e-mails, password reset e-mails, order confirmations, back-in-stock notifications and much more. Despite its importance, I often see that sending e-mail is an overlooked area when writing well maintainable and stable code. It's also often overlooked when monitoring sites and lots of code I have seen just assumes the mail server is up and running. But problems will occur; mail servers will go down, passwords do expire or get changed without updating the web site and more.

In a preceding article you saw how to monitor your site's SMTP server using an ASP.NET Core health check. While it's great to be notified when your SMTP server is unavailable, it would be even better if your site has an alternative way to deliver the messages when the primary SMTP is not available.

In this article, I'll show you a couple of ways to improve the way you send e-mails from your ASP.NET Core applications. In particular, I'll discuss:

• Hiding send functionality behind an interface
• Providing multiple concrete implementations to send e-mails in different ways and configure the best one at runtime
• Implementing a fallback solution for cases where your primary mail server is not available
• How to use MailKit to replace the built-in SmtpClient which is now considered obsolete by Microsoft
• How to use the SendGrid API to send e-mails from your application

You'll find the full code for the article as a download at the end of this article, as well as in the Github repository for this article.

Using standard health checks and building your own checks in ASP.NET Core

Published 5 years ago

Being able to monitor your ASP.NET Core web applications and APIs and detect any issues early on is crucial in ensuring your sites are up and running and in a healthy state. In previous articles I talked about creating a custom health check solution for ASP.NET Framework applications and implementing ASP.NET Core health checks with standard functionality. In this article I'll show you how to add and configure some existing, open-source health checks to monitor an SMTP server and the web server's disk space (these are just examples; there are many more health checks available that you can plug in to your own web site). If the standard health checks aren't sufficient, you can build your own; something you'll see how to do in the second part of this article.

Implementing Health Checks in ASP.NET Framework

Published 5 years ago

Being able to monitor your ASP.NET web applications and APIs and detect any issues early on is crucial in ensuring your sites are up and running and in a healthy state. To implement simple monitoring in ASP.NET apps until ASP.NET 4.x, I usually add some custom code to my projects to provide health information from an endpoint With ASP.NET Core 2.2 and later this now comes in the box. In this article I'll show you how you can implement health checks using custom code targeting the .NET Framework (although it should also work on .NET Core). In future articles I'll then show you how you can set up similar checks in an ASP.NET Core app with standard functionality and how to extend the base system using existing third-party health checks like an SMTP server monitor, to make your health checks even more powerful.

Prefixing ID columns with the table name in Entity Framework

Published 12 years ago

I recently got a question about the database configuration part of my article series on N-Layer design in ASP.NET. In my model, all classes inherit DomainEntity<T> that defines a primary key called Id. This in turn means all primary key columns in the database are called Id as well. The reader wanted to know if it was possible to prefix that column with the entity / table name. So, the Id column in the People table would be called PersonId, the Id in EmailAddress would be called EmailAddressId and so on. This has always been possible (and easy to do) for separate entities, but EF 6's custom conventions makes it a lot easier to do it for the entire model.

ASP.NET N-Layered Applications - Extensions, Tools and Wrapping Up (Part 10)

Published 12 years ago

Note: this is part ten in a series of ten. If you rather read this entire series off-line, you can buy the full series as a convenient PDF document that comes with the full source. Besides the convenience, buying the PDF will also make you feel good as it shows your appreciation for the articles and helps me pay the bills for my server and hosting so I can keep running imar.spaanjaars.com and continue to provide you with great content. For more details, check out this post that shows you how you can buy the entire series right now.

This is Part 10 in a series of 10 that show you how to build N-Layered applications using ASP.NET 4.5 and Entity Framework 5 Code First. In this part I’ll discuss a few miscellaneous topics that I haven’t touched in previous articles in the series.

ASP.NET N-Layered Applications - Importing Data Using the API (Part 9)

Published 12 years ago

Note: this is part nine in a series of ten. If you rather read this entire series off-line, you can buy the full series as a convenient PDF document that comes with the full source. Besides the convenience, buying the PDF will also make you feel good as it shows your appreciation for the articles and helps me pay the bills for my server and hosting so I can keep running imar.spaanjaars.com and continue to provide you with great content. For more details, check out this post that shows you how you can buy the entire series right now.

This is Part 9 in a series of 10 that show you how to build N-Layered applications using ASP.NET 4.5 and Entity Framework 5 Code First. In this part you’ll see how to build a command line application to import data from an external source (a CSV file in this case), using the application’s repository and model classes. Although this article is not related to ASP.NET directly, many ASP.NET developers may still benefit from it as importing data from an external resource is a common activity for ASP.NET developers.

ASP.NET N-Layered Applications - Implementing a WCF 4.5 Frontend (Part 8)

Published 12 years ago

Note: this is part eight in a series of ten. If you rather read this entire series off-line, you can buy the full series as a convenient PDF document that comes with the full source. Besides the convenience, buying the PDF will also make you feel good as it shows your appreciation for the articles and helps me pay the bills for my server and hosting so I can keep running imar.spaanjaars.com and continue to provide you with great content. For more details, check out this post that shows you how you can buy the entire series right now.

This is Part 8 in a series of 10 that show you how to build N-Layered applications using ASP.NET 4.5 and Entity Framework 5 Code First. In this part you’ll see how to build a WCF service that makes use of the model and repository projects I have shown in the first five articles in this series. The WCF service can be used by different types of applications to access contact people and their related data.

ASP.NET N-Layered Applications - Implementing a Web Forms 4.5 Frontend (Part 7)

Published 12 years ago

Note: this is part seven in a series of ten. If you rather read this entire series off-line, you can buy the full series as a convenient PDF document that comes with the full source. Besides the convenience, buying the PDF will also make you feel good as it shows your appreciation for the articles and helps me pay the bills for my server and hosting so I can keep running imar.spaanjaars.com and continue to provide you with great content. For more details, check out this post that shows you how you can buy the entire series right now.

This is Part 7 in a series of 10 that show you how to build N-Layered applications using ASP.NET 4.5 and Entity Framework 5 Code First. In this part you’ll see how to build a Web UI using ASP.NET Web Forms and make use of the model and repository projects I have shown in the first five articles in this series.

ASP.NET N-Layered Applications - Implementing an ASP.NET MVC 4 Frontend (Part 6)

Published 12 years ago

Note: this is part six in a series of ten. If you rather read this entire series off-line, you can buy the full series as a convenient PDF document that comes with the full source. Besides the convenience, buying the PDF will also make you feel good as it shows your appreciation for the articles and helps me pay the bills for my server and hosting so I can keep running imar.spaanjaars.com and continue to provide you with great content. For more details, check out this post that shows you how you can buy the entire series right now.

This is Part 6 in a series of 10 that show you how to build N-Layered applications using ASP.NET 4.5 and Entity Framework 5 Code First. In this part you’ll see how to build a Web UI using ASP.NET MVC 4 and make use of the model and repository projects I have shown in the past five articles.