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Glimpse: The Diagnostic Platform For Web

Introduction

For debugging and getting diagnostic information about a website, Glimpse provides detailed results. Glimpse is very useful and becoming popular these days. It is available as a Nuget package and as an installer (I will show a demo here using the Nuget package). You can also install it from here and can get the configuration help from the following link.

Glimpse is light and gives visual snapshots. One of the best features that I like the most is debugging ajax calls. It provides all the debug and diagnostics information for the server-side calls (Glimpse will tell you what is happening on the sever) as well as client-side calls. This article is best suited for the ASP.Net MVC developers as well as ASP.Net Webform developer.

Create a Sample MVC Application





Now, add a Glimpse Nuget package.



Next, you will see the following references added to the sample application.



You can see the following entry in the web config file.

  1. <httpHandlers>  
  2. <add path="glimpse.axd" verb="GET" type="Glimpse.AspNet.HttpHandler, Glimpse.AspNet" />  
  3. </httpHandlers>  
  4. <glimpse defaultRuntimePolicy="On" endpointBaseUri="~/Glimpse.axd">  
  5. <!--   
  6. For more information on how to configure Glimpse, please visit http://getglimpse.com/Help/Configuration  
  7. or access {your site}/Glimpse.axd for even more details and a Configuration Tool to support you.   
  8. -->  
  9. </glimpse>  
When you run the application, the following screen is visible.



When setting the “Turn Glimpse On”, you can see Glimpse on the bottom-right corner.



When maximizing this, you can see the following screen.



Here, you can see the following tabs.
  • Cache
  • Configuration
  • Environment
  • Execution
  • MetaData
  • Model Binding
  • Request
  • Route
  • Server
  • Session
  • Trace
  • View
  • Timeline

On the Configuration tab, you will get detailed configuration-related information.



When in the Environment tab, you can get all the environment-related information and all the assembly names with their respected version.



When in the Execution tab, you can get the MVC controller information and it's execution time.



When in the Timeline tab, it shows the execution of each request.



And finally, an important tab for getting information for all of your ajax calls.



Conclusion

Glimpse is a powerful tool for debugging and diagnostics analysis for the server as well as the client calls.


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