Managing WCF Services

Any new technology goes through numerous phases in its life cycle. The most exciting phase is the envisioning or evangelizing phase where you are exposed to snazzy marketing material and promises of higher productivity. Then the technology graduates to a phase of gradual implementation by the industry. It is correct to conclude that most people get caught up in the euphoria of technical features in these two phases. Senior managers (that is, CIOs and CTOs) of organizations are keen to deliver the "latest and greatest" technology to their shareholders. However, developers tend to focus their attention on implementing the technology. The development cycle for most of these new applications is much shorter when you compare it to the expected life span of the systems. All these systems need to be maintained efficiently to justify the return on investment (ROI) over a long period of time. Unfortunately, in most cases people tend to overlook the management and operation of new technology. Specifically, how do you continue to support the new system? What are the operational processes that can assist in managing each component? Often, these questions are not appropriately answered when trying to promote new technology.

In fact, organizations often spend millions of dollars building the most state-of-the-art technical solution but are reluctant to consider a substantial budget for operating and managing the new technology. We heard the best description of this dilemma described eloquently by a Microsoft speaker once—he compared operating and managing a new technology to raising a baby. The most exciting part for the parents is conceiving and giving birth to the baby. However, the difficult part of parenting starts after the baby is born. This is similar to the technology life cycle. A lot of emphasis is put on the conception and first implementation of a new technology. However, you achieve most of the effort and the value-added activity (the return to the business stakeholders) by carefully managing and monitoring the system. With the latest trend of outsourcing operational activities to overseas developer centers, the issue of managing the day-to-day operations of any technology is gaining more attention every day. Microsoft has recognized this industry trend and invested in WCF service management to address this issue.

You investigated the WCF architecture and learned how to create and host WCF services in the previous chapters. In this chapter, you will learn how to manage and monitor a WCF service. The objectives of this chapter are as follows:

• We will illustrate the WCF management tools available to developers so they can be more productive. We will discuss the value of building custom code, implementing logging and tracing, using performance counters, and using WMI objects.

• We will illustrate the value of message logging, tracing, WMI, and performance monitors to system administrators for monitoring their IT systems and maintaining them efficiently.

• We will explain the custom performance monitors that business users can work with to cater to different business activities.

• We will explain the custom performance counters and WMI tools available to senior management to monitor their ROI.

We'll first cover the business drivers for managing and monitoring WCF services.