Bringing the Aspire dashboard to ACA

The .NET team just released the GA version of Aspire! It looks awesome check out Demystifying cloud-native development with .NET Aspire here.

The part I am most interested in is the Aspire dashboard which allows you to closely track various aspects of your app, including logs, traces, and environment configurations, in real-time. This was originally designed to enhance the local development experience for cloud native apps, and while most developers will use this locally by creating an Aspire project, it is important to realize that the dashboard itself can be shipped as a Docker image and can be used standalone. The standalone dashboard provides a great UI for viewing telemetry and can be used by any application that uses the OTEL standard (which includes .NET and every other popular framework).

Things are moving quickly though and we are now looking at how the dashboards can be used in a variety of production diagnostics scenarios. Imagine for a moment you have deployed a new app and you want to quickly review the logs or look at why an app request is so slow Well now you can! Azure Container Apps now supports the Aspire dashboard in public preview so you can access live data about your project and containers in the cloud to evaluate the performance of your applications and debug errors with comprehensive logs, metrics, and traces.

You can enable the .NET Aspire Dashboard on any existing container app using the following steps.

1. Go to the Azure portal.

2. Open the Overview window of your container app.

3. Find the .NET Aspire Dashboard label, and select the enable link.

4. Next to the .NET Aspire Dashboard label, select the Enabled checkbox.

5. Navigate to the URL of your dashboard.

Now when you navigate to the ACA resource the overview page has an active Open dashboard link.

For someone grounded in debugging and diagnostics this is an exciting step that will uplevel the diagnostics posture for .NET and Azure across the board.