Logging heartbeats from .NET (Core) Worker Services

.NET (Core) offers Worker Services as a way to schedule recurring tasks either hosted inside an ASP.NET Core website or as a Windows Service. Monitoring that Worker Services run successfully, can be easily set up with elmah.io Heartbeats.

To register heartbeats from a worker service, start by creating a new heartbeat on the elmah.io UI. For this example, we want to monitor that a Service Worker is running every 5 minutes, why we set Interval to 5 minutes and Grace to 1 minute. Next, install the Elmah.Io.Client NuGet package:

Install-Package Elmah.Io.Client

dotnet add package Elmah.Io.Client

<PackageReference Include="Elmah.Io.Client" Version="5.*" />

paket add Elmah.Io.Client

In the Program.cs or Startup.cs file (depending on where you register dependencies), register IHeartbeats from the elmah.io client:

.ConfigureServices((hostContext, services) =>
{
    var elmahIoApi = ElmahioAPI.Create(hostContext.Configuration["ElmahIo:ApiKey"]);
    services.AddSingleton(elmahIoApi.Heartbeats);
    // ...
    services.AddHostedService<Worker>();
});

In the example, the configuration should be made available in the appsettings.json file as shown later in this article.

In the service class (Worker) you can inject the IHeartbeats object, as well as additional configuration needed to create heartbeats:

public class Worker : BackgroundService
{
    private readonly IHeartbeats heartbeats;
    private readonly Guid logId;
    private readonly string heartbeatId;

    public Worker(IHeartbeats heartbeats, IConfiguration configuration)
    {
        this.heartbeats = heartbeats;
        this.logId = new Guid(configuration["ElmahIo:LogId"]);
        this.heartbeatId = configuration["ElmahIo:HeartbeatId"];
    }
}

Inside the ExecuteAsync method, wrap the worker code in try-catch and call the HealthyAsync method when the worker successfully run and the UnhealthyAsync method when an exception occurs:

protected override async Task ExecuteAsync(CancellationToken stoppingToken)
{
    while (!stoppingToken.IsCancellationRequested)
    {
        try
        {
            // Do work

            await heartbeats.HealthyAsync(logId, heartbeatId);
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            await heartbeats.UnhealthyAsync(logId, heartbeatId, e.ToString());
        }

        await Task.Delay(TimeSpan.FromMinutes(5), stoppingToken);
    }
}

In the appsettings.json file, add the elmah.io configuration:

{
  "ElmahIo": {
    "ApiKey": "API_KEY",
    "LogId": "LOG_ID",
    "HeartbeatId": "HEARTBEAT_ID"
  }
}

Replace the values with values found in the elmah.io UI. Remember to enable the Heartbeats | Write permission on the used API key.

This article was brought to you by the elmah.io team. elmah.io is the best error management system for .NET web applications. We monitor your website, alert you when errors start happening, and help you fix errors fast.

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