Azure deployment with and New Relic - asp.net-mvc

I have automated deployment of ASP.NET MVC app which uses NewRelic for performance profiling to azure using MSBuild and WebDeploy.
I have used waws-prod-blu-001.publish.azurewebsites.windows.net:443 url for deployment as it was mentioned in publish profile. Also I stop my website before deployment and start after as NewRelic locks some log files so deployment fails. This is official workaround mentioned in NewRelic documentation.
Usually deployment takes 2-3 minutes. However last days deployment started taking more than 30 minutes and fails from time to time. I have downloaded new publish profile and noticed that WebDeploy url was changed to KUDU url ({my-app}.scm.azurewebsites.net:443). After updating url deployment takes 2-3 minutes as usual. However when I stop website KUDU is also not accessible and I cannot do deployment.
My question is: how can I do deployment of Azure website which uses NewRelic via KUDU when NewRelic requires website to be stopped while deployment and KUDU requires website running for deployment. Any other way of deployment are also acceptable.
I have already tried next things:
1) Deploy via FTP is also very, very slow as it uses the same url (ftps://waws-prod-blu-001.publish.azurewebsites.windows.net/).
2) Restaring website before deployment doesn't help. NewRelic still locks some log file.

In the Azure portal you can force Azure to unload the profiler DLL file by changing the app setting COR_ENABLE_PROFILING to 0 and hitting save. This will restart IIS and unload the DLL without users seeing any error (just a delay in getting to the site). You can then run the deploy which should proceed without the locking issue. Make sure that the app setting is back to 1 when your finished deploying.
You can also do this via Azure Powershell.

We made a recent change that allows Kudu to continue running even if you stop the site. So the simpler way to avoid this issue now is simply to stop the site, publish, and restart the site.

Related

TFS Release Task to Deploy a Web Deploy Package to specific directory

I've been digging for hours and i haven't been able to find what i would think is a pretty common scenario.
I am attempting to deploy a Web Deploy Package to my existing Web Site\Web App via a TFS Release. The location of my existing Web Apps is mapped to a different drive. My source code on my web server is not in C:\inetpub lets say its in D:\MyFiles.
I'm open to using any TFS task to do this. It seems like my two options are:
Run Batch Script - point to myApp.deploy.cmd
WinRm IIS Web App Deployment
I've seen lots of examples of overriding the computer name via the setParamater file but I have not seen one example of how to set the target path for the package?
Again, i want to deploy a web package via a TFS release to D:\MyFiles. I've created the package and it deploys locally to c:inetpub, I would assume if I can get it to deploy to a specified Target location locally then when I run that same. CMD file from TFS release it will use that location on the deploy to server.
UPDATE:
So... this just started working. I'm not sure what the issue was but the WinRm Task didn't do the deploy on Friday but did the deploy on Monday. I'm thinking it may have been related to a FQDN for the server path? Honestly I'm not sure what fixed it or what to do with this post? The answer below by #Andy may help someone so I won't delete it. That link is a good one and it showed me how to perform IIS configuration with Web Deploy.
Thanks in advance,
Greg
Seems you are trying to change the physical path of an IIS site/app using MSDeploy.
Just try adding an additional command (appcmd) to the MSDeploy package manifest to change the physical path of the IIS site during the deployment:
<runcommand path="%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set app /app.name:"Default Web Site/app12" /[path='/'].physicalPath:C:\temp\app12" waitInterval="5000"/>
Refer to this article for details:
WebDeploy/MSDeploy Quick TIP: Change IIS Site/APP Physical Path with MSDeploy

Public testing environment for RoR + Angular

currently I need a little hint for test running a RoR + Angular Application. And with test running I talk about that the "project owner" can see the current version of the project. For large projects with a lot of developers we had a build server, where the server got the current version from the git repository and deployed it as a "nightly build".
For projects where I'm the only developer I use dropbox to synchronize my working directory to a server, that is accessible for the project owner.
But now I'm working on a small project with 2 other developers. The build server is too much and the dropbox solution, well it's not going to work, because every one of us has a different state. And working on the same Dropbox directory is a no go.
So what's the best solution?
Consider running it on Heroku, which has a free tier. Once set up properly, deployments can be done by simply pushing to your Heroku git remote, or you can set it up to watch an existing remote repository branch (such as a particular branch on Github).
Or you could run it on your own machine. If you are behind a firewall you could set up a tunnel so your team can see it, with something like ngrok.

Apache Service Mix Deployment Approaches

Folks,
We have got an enterprise application which uses Apache Service Mix for deployment. The application consists of various services and each is created as separate Maven project (bundle).During development, we are actually building each service separately and in-order to deploy it,its being put in the deploy folder. Also, we have to uninstall the bundle from the container(say; karaf) and then install it again from the console to bring the new changes in effect. This is fine during the development phase.
Now we want to deploy the code to an UAT environment (Amazon EC2) for the client to do the testing. We are now confused about how to deploy the bundles to the remote environment. Do we have a standard approach for CI using Jenkins(or some other tool) to automate the build and deploy process , so that someone who has no knowledge about the bundles(SMX) can deploy the code. We are using Github for source code management.
We have searched a lot in this regard and couldn't find any resources which provide some leads/hints on this.
Any help/tips is highly appreciated. If you need more info, I can give more details.
~Ragesh
We do have exactly similar setup and we use the Jenkins to build and let the Sysadmin to copy the bundles to one server and then he enables the rsync to rest of the servers.
Remember, always deploy the dependent bundle first and then remaining ..
Since we have this dependency ,we can't go automating this process.

Runtime error when deploying to Azure because of one dll file

I build the app using Visual Studio and already publish it to Azure Services.
However, when trying to run it, I got the following error:
Could not load file or assembly 'RandomColorGenerator.Forms' or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.
I looked into the bin folder in my local project and I can see the dll file just right.
Any suggestions?
According to your description, your MVC project could work on your development environment, but when deployed to Azure Web App, you got the above error. Per my understanding, you could follow the possible approaches below to troubleshoot this issue:
Use KUDU which is an analysis tool for Azure Web Apps, click on the "Debug console > CMD", then check your deployed web content under D:\home\site\wwwroot\. Make sure the missing dll has been deployed to Azure Web App successfully.
You could try to create a new web app for deploying your MVC project, in order to isolate this issue.
Additionally, you could try to empty your deployed web content via KUDU or redeploy your project by select "Delete all existing files prior to publish" under the "Setting > File Publish Options" of VS publish wizard.
UPDATE:
Based on your comment, you are using Azure Cloud Services. You could enable Remote Desktop and re-publish your application, then remote to your cloud services for troubleshooting this issue. Here is a similar issue, you could refer to it.
An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.
As I known, the above message means that there be a 32-bit or 64-bit
platform conflict. For more details, you could refer to this similar issue.

How to monitor and maintain my grails application in live/production environment?

It is the first time I have ever launched live a website (with Grails web framework under Amazon EC2 platform and Cloud Foundry) and I realized quickly that I am not ready for monitoring and maintening correctly my application in production mode (fortunately the website is accessible to a very limited number of users) .
The issues I have faced so far are:
Cannot change my views. I need to redeploy my application
I have no monitoring. I don't know who is connected, when do they sign in / sign out...
Redploying my application (upload WAR + deploy) takes at least 30 minutes.
I don't know how to restart my Tomcat server without a redeploy through Cloud Foundry !
...
So, my question is very simple:
What tools (including grails plugins) and methods can you recommend me for taking me out from my current blindness?
I am not sure how much this will help, however I use the JavaMelody Grails Plugin(http://www.grails.org/plugin/grails-melody) I use it to see if the site is being used before I pull down the service.
Hope that helps.
I tried Cloud Foundry in it's early days and found it a little rough. Sounds like that's still the case with 30+ minute deploys and the inability to restart your tomcat server. Half of your problems could be solved if you just created your own EC2 instance, installed tomcat and managed your own deployments. That'll let you bounce tomcat through shell access:
sudo /etc/init.d/tomcat6 restart
and redeploy your app
sudo /etc/init.d/tomcat6/stop
cp my.war /to/tomcat/dir
sudo /etc/init.d/tomcat6 start
or else you could do it through the tomcat admin console, but I find it to be flaky.
Regarding monitoring, there are a couple of ways you can do that. The easiest is to add CloudWatch monitoring to your system. That'll give you more insight into the performance of the application.
For more detailed monitoring regarding who's connecting to your app, I'd suggest looking at Google Analytics or Mint. If you need to get beyond that (with per user monitoring), you'll likely have to roll your own logging/tracking for what meets your needs. There are also other paid packages out there along the lines of Google Analytics and Mint that you can integrate with, but what fits your needs best, I can't say.
For actual monitoring of deployed system you can also use Hiperic HQ. It's a monitoring solution from Spring Source, who also are owners of Grails Framework.
It can manage, at your case:
tomcat server
database
linux
network
etc
btw redeploying app with changes is ok. it's a very bad practice to modify running app, on the production server.
I don't know if JMX and JConsole can help, but that might be a good way to see what the status of JMX-enabled POJOs is. Spring makes this easy to do.
Yes, you need to re-deploy your app when you change stuff in it, there's no way around that.
Deploy/re-deploy time has been cut significantly recently if using the grails plugin (btw, what version of the plugin do you use?) In some cases the upload time is as short as 15 seconds. Add 2-3 minutes for Amazon to spin up the instances and the deploy time is still pretty manageable. For re-deploy the instances don't have to be started, so it's even less than that.
To restart Tomcat login into your CloudFoundry account, click on the Deployment details, click on the instance that's running your Tomcat, and there will be a button "Restart service" that will do just that - restart Tomcat service.
You don't have to start your own EC2 instances in order to get a shell access. Copy the public DNS name of the instance from DeploymentDetails, and SSH into it using the private key you entered when registering for Cloudfoundry. Example:
ssh -i /path/to/gsg-keypair.pem root#your_instance_DNS_name

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