Windows Install Overview

Our Windows monitoring agent is a .NET application that runs as a Windows Service on your server. Retrace is supported on Windows 2012 R2 and newer and is installed via a simple Windows installer.

Download Windows Installer

The Windows installer also installs our .NET profiler and it will automatically profile IIS web applications.

Installing via Command Line

The Retrace installer can be used via command line. This is useful for automating deployments with things like Chef, EC2, Azure Cloud Services, and other scenarios.

"StackifyInstallFile.exe" /s 
   /v"ACTIVATIONKEY=ENTER_YOUR_KEY_HERE ENVIRONMENT=\"ENTER_ENVIRONMENT_HERE\" 
   ENABLEPROFILER=1 RESTARTIIS=1 NEWPROFILER=1 ATTACHALL=0 
   /qn /l*v .\Log.txt"

Command line arguments:

• ACTIVATIONKEY - This is your Retrace license/activation key
• ENVIRONMENT - The name of your deployment environment. Prod, QA, etc
• ENABLEPROFILER - This should be a 1 or 0. If you want to profile the performance of your .NET applications, this should be set to a 1.
• RESTARTIIS - Retrace's .NET profiler will not work until IIS is restarted after installation. Set this to a 1 to have Retrace automatically restart it, or set it to 0 and manually restart IIS yourself.
• ATTACHALL - This must be set to a 1 if you want to use Retrace with .NET Core or Windows Services. It is not required for ASP.NET full framework applications running in IIS.
• NEWPROFILER - Should be set to 1 to use the new profiler.

If you wish to install the agent on a server remotely, you can script the installation like this:

Start-Process $file -ArgumentList '/s /v"ACTIVATIONKEY=ENTER_YOUR_KEY_HERE ENVIRONMENT=\"ENTER_ENVIRONMENT_HERE\"
ENABLEPROFILER=1 RESTARTIIS=1 NEWPROFILER=1 ATTACHALL=1 /qn /l*v C:\StackifyInstallLog.txt"' -Wait

Install Manually

Download the installer

Run the downloaded installer and follow the installation steps below.

1. Enter Your Account's Activation Key

You will be prompted for an Activation Key. This key identifies your server as belonging to your company.

You can find your Activation Key from your Account Info page within Retrace.

2. Set The Server Environment

For each server, you will be prompted to set the Environment. This is a way of grouping your servers based on production environment, location, client, etc. Most commonly used as Prod, QA, etc.

3. Choose Features To Enable

Enable Retrace for IIS

Selecting this feature will automatically discover all .NET applications that are hosted within IIS and begin monitoring them.

Enable Retrace for .NET Core, Windows Services, and Worker Roles

Selecting this feature will allow you to monitor and profile .NET Core and non-web apps. You may still need to add additional configuration to let the profiler know where to find your app and how to profile it. Further documentation is available for:

• .NET APM Overview
• Configuring Windows Services

4. Choose When To Restart IIS

Selecting this option will restart IIS immediately after installation of the .NET agent, which may be unwanted for Production servers. You will still be able to begin monitoring, but you will not receive any APM data until IIS is restarted.

5. Select The Destination Folder

The default installation folder for the Retrace agent is C:\Program Files (x86)\Stackify. Changing this path may create issues with certain features, such as agent updates, and we recommend leaving the default setting.

Viewing your Servers

Once the agent installation process has completed, you should now be able to login to Retrace and view your server under the Server Monitoring page!