🔥 First Firefights Link to heading
In the early days, most of our effort went into understanding where things failed.
The system would break under pressure, produce unclear error messages, or behave unreliably depending on deployment timing.
We had no telemetry. No usable monitoring. Bug reports were anecdotal.
This forced us into manual observation and creative debugging — and pushed us to establish a more structured approach to system setup and error diagnostics.
We didn’t start by rewriting the app or deploying shiny monitoring tools.
We started by asking the right questions:
- Where are the bottlenecks?
- What keeps breaking, and why?
- Can we eliminate repetitive troubleshooting tasks?
What We Did Link to heading
These questions led us to concrete actions:
- Collected IIS request logs, application logs, and used Event Tracing for Windows across tiers
- Enabled Windows Performance Counters to track CPU, memory, disk, and network metrics
- Introduced manual trace correlation using timestamps to match user reports with backend behavior
- Developed tools to export and visualize performance metrics regularly
- Began analyzing memory dumps from failed processes to uncover crash patterns and memory leaks
- Built early PowerShell scripts to standardize system setup — the first steps toward what would become DscConfigIt (more in a future post)
What We Gained Link to heading
This phase gave us our first objective view into how the system performed under load — and where its weak points really were.
Every log line, every trace, every script brought us closer to stability.
The Long Haul Link to heading
This wasn’t a two-week sprint. It was over two years of relentless effort.
But every gain in visibility, every automated setup, and every new data point made the next issue easier to handle.
Each of these early tactics — from log analysis to memory dumps — will be explored in upcoming blog entries.
We didn’t put out all the fires.
But we finally understood where they were coming from — and how to fight them.