I’m very happy to announce that we have recently released version 6.0 of Entity Framework Profiler and NHibernate Profiler. Here are some of the highlights:

This new version brings quite a lot to the table. We applied a lot of lessons to optimize the performance of the profiler so it can process events faster and in a more efficient manner. We also fully integrated it with the async/await model that became so popular. For Entity Framework users, we now support all versions of EF, running on .NET 4.7 all the way to .NET 5.0 and anything in between.

What I think is the crown jewels of this release, however, is the new Azure integration feature. We initially built this feature to allow you to profiler serverless code and Azure Functions, but it turned out that this is really useful.

The Profiler Azure Integration allows you to setup a storage container on Azure that would accept the profiled output from your application. Pretty simple, right? The profiler application will monitor the container and show you the events as they are written, so even if you don’t have direct access to profiler the code (very common on serverless / Azure scenarios), you can still profiler your code. That helps a lot as well when talking about running inside containers, Kubernetes, etc. The usual way the profiler and the application communicate is over a TCP channel, but given the myriad of network topologies that are now in common use, this can get complex. By utilizing Azure Integration, we can resolve the whole solution and give you a seamless way to handle profile your code.

On demand profiling of your code is just one part of the new feature. You can now do continuous profiling of your system. Because we throw the events into a blob container in Azure, and given that the data is compressed and cheap to store, you can now afford to simply record all the queries in your application and come back to it a few days or weeks later and look into interesting behaviors.

That is also a large part of why we worked on improving our performance, we expect to be dealing with a lot of data.

You are also able to specify a certain timeframe for this kind of profiling, as well as specify whatever we should remove the data after looking on it or retain it. The new profiling feature gives you a way to answer: “What queries run in production on Monday between 9:17 and 10:22 AM”. This comes with all of the usual benefits of the profiler, meaning that:

• You can correlate each query to the exact line of code that triggered it.
• The profiler analyze the database interaction and raise alerts on bad behaviors.

The last part is done not on a single query but with access to the full state of the system. It can allow you to find hot spots in your program, patterns of data access that leads to much higher latency and cost a lot more money.

To celebrate the new release, we are offering the profilers with 20% discount for the new quarter as well as offer a bundling option. You can get the Entity Framework Profiler or the NHibernate Profiler bundled with our Cosmos DB Profiler.