Troubleshooting

Sitefinity SaaS provides easy access to the tools and resources needed to troubleshoot problems with your project.

Sitefinity SaaS provides comprehensive logging to assist website administrators and developers in  troubleshoot any issues, as well as monitoring the health of the application. By default, Sitefinity SaaS exposes the following logs: 

• Build & Deployment logs
  These logs indicate the state of the application build & deployment processes.
  For ASP.NET Core Renderer: You can view these logs by clicking on the DotNetCoreRenderer.CI.CD pipeline in the Pipelines section of your Sitefinity SaaS project.
  For Next.js Renderer: You can view these logs by clicking on the NextJsRenderer.CI.CD pipeline in the Pipelines section of your Sitefinity SaaS project.
• Sitefinity CMS logs
  These include all Sitefinity CMS logs, such as the ones that are contained in the Error.log and Trace.log, and AuditTrail.log files when hosting Sitefinity on-prem.
  You can access them from the Management Portal of your Sitefinity SaaS project.
• Decoupled Renderer logs
  These include the ASP.NET Core Renderer application logs or the Next.js Renderer application logs. You can access them from the Management Portal of your Sitefinity SaaS project.

View the logs

To open your Sitefinity SaaS project logs and drill down in the application health data, perform the following:

1. Open the Management Portal Welcome page.
2. In the Environments section, click the View Logs link of the desired environment.
   The Logs page opens. In the left navigation, the page displays a collection of predefined logs for your application, such as:
   • traces
     In this log, you can find tracing information about the application performance and any handled exceptions.
   • exceptions
     In this log, you can find IIS error, warning, and information events data, as well as any unhandled exceptions, usually logged in the on-premise versions of Sitefinity CMS log files.
3. To view the entries inside any log, hover over the log and click Preview data.
4. In the Query explorer, you can view different log entries by clicking a query entry and running it.
   There are predefined query sets - Sitefinity logs filtered by log type. Using these queries, you can access Sitefinity CMS logs by log type - ErrorLog, Trace, Authentication, etc.

Query the logs information

By default, when you view log entries, you are presented with the latest 50 entries in it. Since the Sitefinity SaaS logs management is based on Azure Monitor Log Analytics, you can build complex queries with the information contained in each log entry. This way, developers and website administrators can easily find the information relevant to them, as well as implement custom logic for observing the entries they are interested in.
For more information on the query syntax and advanced capabilities, see Log Analytics Tutorial.

By default, your Sitefinity SaaS project has a performance profiler enabled in auto mode. This means that the profiler automatically collects data in the background on certain intervals without imposing an extra overhead on your application performance. 

You can view, drill down, and analyze the collected profiler data by navigating to the Performance pane of your Sitefinity SaaS project Application Insights in the Azure portal:

The profiler is based on the Application Insights Profiler and automatically collects data about your application components - such as server-side operations, client-side operations, page views, and more.

Profile performance on demand

By default, the performance profiler collects data on certain intervals as determined by the Azure default logic. If you want to profile your application on demand, you can manually enable the performance profiler and monitor the results while browsing the parts of your application, which performance you want to measure. To enable the performance profiler, follow these steps:

1. In your Sitefinity SaaS Management Portal dashboard, click the Logs link for the desired environment.
2. Once the Application Insights page for your project opens, click Performance in the left-hand navigation.
3. From the top navigation, click Configure Profiler.
   
   
4. On the next screen, click the Profile now button.

As a result, the profiler is enabled and you can monitor the ongoing sessions as you browse your Sitefinity SaaS project. The profiler will run for a few minutes until it collects sufficient data.

1. In your Sitefinity SaaS Management Portal, navigate to Pipelines section.
2. For ASP.NET Core Renderer: Click the DotNetCoreRenderer.CI.CD pipeline.
   For Next.js Renderer: Click the NextJsRenderer.CI.CD pipeline.
3. Click the desired deployed release.
   The deployment stages appear.
4. Under the CI stage, click on the <Number> artifacts link. 
   The list of artifacts for the CI stage opens.
5. Expand the drop folder.
   
6. Download the DeploymentPackage.zip.
   This is the package that is deployed on all environments by the deployment process. Only the configurations differ between the environments. For more information, see Manage the configurations.
7. Extract the files from the .zip file and inspect the deployment package.

Sitefinity SaaS is integrated with Azure Monitor Application Insights, thus delivering all available troubleshooting tools and mechanisms. For more information, see Application Insights overview.

For example, you can use Live Metrics to monitor real-time data about your website's incoming and outgoing requests, as well as CPU utilization, memory consumption, and exception rate. For more information about using Live Metrics, see Live Metrics: Monitor and diagnose with 1-second latency.