Upcoming Manila Presentation: Your website is in production. It’s broken. Now what?

Next month I’ll be spending some time in the Readify Manila office catching up with some local colleagues. While there, I’ll be presenting a user group session at the local Microsoft office. If you’re in the area, I’d love to see you there. (Did you know that we’re hiring in Manila too?)

—

Manila, Philippines, Wed 12^th Dec 2012. Free. Register now.

Big websites fail in spectacular ways. In this session, five-time awarded ASP.NET/IIS MVP and ASP Insider Tatham Oddie will share the problems that he and fellow Readify consultants have solved on large scale, public websites. The lessons are applicable to websites of all sizes and audiences, and also include some funny stories. (Not so funny at the time.)

—

A tiny subset of your users can’t login: they get no error message yet have both cookies and JavaScript enabled. They’ve phoned up to report the problem and aren’t capable of getting a Fiddler trace. You’re serving a million hits a day. How do you trace their requests and determine the problem without drowning in logs?

Marketing have requested that the new site section your team has built goes live at the same time as a radio campaign kicks off. This needs to happen simultaneously across all 40 front-end web servers, and you don’t want to break your regular deployment cycle while the marketing campaign gets perpetually delayed. How do you do it?

Users are experiencing HTTP 500 responses for a few underlying reasons, some with workarounds and some without. The customer service call centre need to be able to rapidly evaluate incoming calls and provide the appropriate workaround where possible, without displaying sensitive exception detail to end users. At the same time, your team needs to prioritize which bugs to fix first. What’s the right balance of logging, error numbers and correlations ids?

Your application is running slow in production, causing major delays for all users. You don’t have any tools on the production servers, and aren’t allowed to install any. How do you get to the root of the problem?