Introduction
While Microsoft Orleans has developed into a robust and scalable product over the years, the engagement between the Orleans team and the community around it is a spectacular example of the collaboration that open source projects should foster. On the one hand, the Orleans team members make themselves very available to help out with questions and issues that developers have when using Orleans. On the other hand, developers using Orleans have together built OrleansContrib, a collection of repositories adding unofficial functionality on top of what Orleans provides.
These repositories cover a variety of different areas: storage providers, logging and telemetry, documentation on design patterns, virtual meetups… and, of course, the Orleans Dashboard. This dashboard is a great way to monitor the activity of your silos and the grains within them.
Dashboard Overview
At a glance, the dashboard gives you a brief summary of your active silos, and the grain activations within them.
In the Grains section, you get an overview of the total grain activations in your silos, and a breakdown of each grain type. For each type of grain, you can see statistics on the number of activations, the rate of exceptions, throughput, and latency. In this case I haven’t actually created any grains, so all you can see are the system grains and the ones created by the Dashboard itself; however the data you see here will be a lot more interesting once you use it to monitor the activity and behaviour of your actual grains.
You can home in on an individual grain type. Aside from the statistics mentioned earlier, you also get detailed statistics on throughput, latency and failed requests per method.
At the bottom of the same page detailing a single type of grain, you can see a list of activations of that grain by silo.
Moving on, in the Silos section, you can see a summary of your active silos.
When you click on a silo, it gives you a more detailed view. At the top, you can see a graphical view showing resource utilisation: CPU, memory, and grains.
At the bottom, there are sections showing Silo Counters (number of clients, and messages sent and received), Silo Properties (information about the silo and its configuration), and a list of grain activations by type in the silo.
Adding the Dashboard to an Orleans silo
The Orleans Dashboard GitHub page explains how to set up and configure the dashboard. The first thing you need to do is install a NuGet package:
Install-Package OrleansDashboard
Then you will need to add an entry in the silo configuration to enable the dashboard. This can be done either using the XML configuration, or programmatically in code.
If you’re using a Dev/Test Host project to play with Orleans, it’s probably easier to do this in code. Find the file OrleansHostWrapper.cs, and after adding using OrleansDashboard; at the top, add the highlighted line below to register the dashboard:
var config = ClusterConfiguration.LocalhostPrimarySilo();
config.AddMemoryStorageProvider();
config.Globals.RegisterDashboard();
siloHost = new SiloHost(siloName, config);
If, on the other hand, you have a properly partitioned set of projects (as in “Getting Started with Microsoft Orleans“) and are using an OrleansConfiguration.xml file for your silo’s configuration, then just add an entry for the dashboard under the <Globals> node:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<OrleansConfiguration xmlns="urn:orleans">
<Globals>
<SeedNode Address="localhost" Port="11111" />
<BootstrapProviders>
<Provider Type="OrleansDashboard.Dashboard" Name="Dashboard" />
</BootstrapProviders>
</Globals>
<Defaults>
<Networking Address="localhost" Port="11111" />
<ProxyingGateway Address="localhost" Port="30000" />
</Defaults>
</OrleansConfiguration>
The dashboard runs by default at localhost:8080. If you want, you can change the port, or add basic username/password security. See the Orleans Dashboard page for an example showing how to configure these.
Summary
The Orleans dashboard is a great way to get detailed information about the silos in an Orleans cluster, and the grains within those silos. With detailed statistics like throughput, latency and failed requests, it is an invaluable tool to not only monitor the smooth operation of the cluster, but also to troubleshoot errors and performance bottlenecks.
Setting up the dashboard involves simply installing a NuGet package and then adding some very simple configuration to enable it. Additional configuration to change the port or add username/password protection is also possible.
The Orleans Dashboard homepage claims that:
“This project is alpha quality, and is published to collect community feedback.”
I’d argue that it’s pretty damn impressive for something that claims to be alpha quality.
See also: Orleans Virtual Meetup #11: A monitoring and visualisation show with Richard Astbury, Dan Vanderboom and Roger Creyke (13th October 2016).
