Centralized management

Monitoring, diagnosing, and troubleshooting are three key responsibilities of the operations team. Services hosted on Service Fabric can be centrally managed, monitored, and diagnosed outside application boundaries. While monitoring and diagnostics are most important in a production environment, adopting similar tools and processes in development and test environments makes the system more deterministic. The Service Fabric SDK natively supports capabilities around diagnostics which works seamlessly on both local development setups and production cluster setups.

Service Fabric has native support for Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). Service Fabric code itself uses ETW for internal tracing. This allows developers to centrally access application traces interleaved with Service Fabric system traces, which significantly helps in debugging. ETW is fast and works exactly the same way on development and production environments. However, ETW traces are local to the machine. While running a multi-node cluster, it helps to have a centralized vision on logs produced by all the services running in the cluster. The Azure Diagnostics extension can be used for this purpose. The extension can collect the logs from configured sources and aggregate it in Azure Storage to enable centralized access. External processes can be used to read the events from storage and place them into a product such as Log Analytics or Elastic Search, or another log-parsing solution for better visualization.