We use New Relic at work to monitor and report on uptime, performance and errors in our Azure application. New Relic comes with a built-in profiler that can be configured to hook into methods so that hot-path traces can be shown when a page takes longer than usual to load – invaluable when diagnosing bottle-necks.

However, configuring the profiler’s a manual process – you must maintain an XML file that lists the assemblies, classes and methods to instrument. Since it’s manual, it’s not in sync with your code unless you keep it so:

• You must remember when you change a method signature or name
• It doesn’t keep up with refactoring events

To help, I threw NRConfig together. It lets you:

• Generate a custom instrumentation file for an arbitrary assembly, using some simple command-line filtering
• Generate a custom instrumentation file for assemblies you’ve marked up with a particular attribute, giving you more fine-grained control
• Merge multiple custom instrumentation files into one

Available from:

• NuGet or direct download
• Source on GitHub
• Documentation

Associated blog posts:

• Automatically generating custom instrumentation configuration files for NewRelic with .NET
• Instrument specific types using wildcards with nrconfig