Announcing immediate support for .NET Core 2.0

Published September 18, 2017 Updated August 3, 2020 2 min read

Michael Kopp

Microsoft has just announced the final release of .NET Core 2.0 and we’re proud to announce that, with the release of OneAgent version 127, Dynatrace now supports .NET Core 2.0. This includes support for ASP.NET Core 2.0.

What’s included in .NET Core 2.0 support

Web monitoring

Dynatrace provides out-of-the-box support for ASP.NET Core (versions 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0). Dynatrace automatically detects deployed web applications and tracks all web requests. For each web request, you get response times, CPU usage, and locking times. Dynatrace also detects each failed request and provides an exception stacktrace that shows you the root cause of each failure.

Database monitoring

OneAgent monitors all ADO.NET-based database interactions, including Entity Framework Core. You’ll see execution times of every single SQL statement.

CPU method hotspots

Dynatrace monitors the CPU usage of all threads as they process each transaction. Additionally, OneAgent monitors background activity threads (i.e, CPU time that’s spent on threads that handle background tasks).

GC Metrics

Dynatrace delivers the following GC metrics out-of-the-box:

% Time in GC
Gen 0/1/2 heap size
Gen 0/1/2 collection count
LOH size

These metrics are named based on the .NET Memory Performance Counter metrics that are available with full CLR. However, since performance counters aren’t available in .NET Core, we’ve employed Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) to gather this information.

Custom entry points

If you’re not running a web application, but rather a standalone executable (GUI application, batch process, etc), you can specify any method in your code to act as the executable’s entry point. To do this, go to Settings > Server-side service monitoring > Custom services, click the Create custom service button, and set up the method as a custom service. Learn more about configuring detection of custom application services.

Azure integration

For Azure App Service, take advantage of our Azure Site Extension. For Azure VMs, see Azure monitoring with the Dynatrace VM extension.

Getting started with .NET Core

To enable monitoring for your .NET Core processes

Go to Settings > Monitoring > Monitored technologies and set the .NET Core (Beta) switch to the On position.
Select Hosts from the navigation menu and then select your host from the Hosts list. You’ll find all your host’s processes listed in the Processes and Docker containers section of the host page (see below).
Click the Browse […] button to open the host’s Process group settings page.
To enable monitoring of your processes, set the Automatically monitor newly found processes switch to the On position (see below).
Restart the process to inject OneAgent into the host’s .NET Core 2.0 processes and begin capturing monitoring data.