All 16 Diagnostics & Performance questions
More in Diagnostics & Performance
What is the Diagnostics IPC channel, and how do diagnostic tools like dotnet-trace connect to a running .NET process without a debugger? How does dotnet-counters provide live performance monitoring, and what key metrics does it expose by default? What is Application Insights (or OpenTelemetry) integration, and what value does it add over basic logging? What is BenchmarkDotNet, and why is it preferred over manual Stopwatch-based timing for measuring code performance? What is the purpose of the dotnet-monitor tool, and how does it enable diagnostics in containerized/production environments? What is a memory dump, and how do you capture and analyze one for a .NET application experiencing high memory usage or a crash? What is the purpose of health check response caching and how does frequent health check polling itself impact application performance? What is the Large Object Heap (LOH), and why do objects larger than 85,000 bytes behave differently in the garbage collector? How does the dotnet-gcdump tool help diagnose managed memory leaks, and how do you analyze the resulting heap snapshot? How do EventCounters and the newer System.Diagnostics.Metrics API (Meter) let you expose custom application-specific performance metrics?
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.NET › Diagnostics & Performance

What tools does .NET provide for basic application diagnostics, and what is dotnet-trace used for?

Beginner

Answer

The .NET SDK includes global diagnostic tools installable via `dotnet tool install -g`: dotnet-trace collects CPU and runtime event traces for performance analysis, dotnet-counters displays live performance counters (GC stats, request rate, CPU usage), dotnet-dump captures and analyzes memory dumps, and dotnet-gcdump captures GC heap snapshots -- all usable against a running process without needing to restart or attach a debugger.
dotnet tool install -g dotnet-trace
dotnet-trace collect --process-id 1234 --duration 00:00:30
# Produces a .nettrace file, viewable in PerfView or Visual Studio
Real-world example An on-call engineer diagnosing a production CPU spike attaches dotnet-trace to the running process for 30 seconds without any downtime, then analyzes the resulting trace file to identify the specific method consuming excessive CPU.

Common follow-ups: How do you view a .nettrace file's contents?;What's the performance overhead of running dotnet-trace against a live process?

Logging;Memory Management & Garbage Collection
All 16 Diagnostics & Performance questions