Process Explorer

Sahil Malik: Next let’s talk about Process Explorer. Now, technically this is part of Kudu but I think it deserves its own callout. So let’s do that because when you’re working on an IIS website and you’re writing a simple web application, frequently you need to look at processes, right? How do you do that in an Azure Functions environment? Let’s see.

So again I’m in my function app platform features and look for Kudu and go ahead and click on it. Here there’s a link called Process Explorer. Go ahead and click on it. It’ll think for a while. You see this animation over here? Just give it a moment. And in a moment you’ll see that it’s telling me that it’s running two w3wp processes and it’s running node.exe in them. It even gives me the process I.D., telling me exactly how much C.P.U. time I’m taking or how much memory I’m using, the threads. I can choose to start profiling this because I’m in a consumption plan but if I was in an app service plan, I could start profiling this. I can even look at say properties here and it gives me a whole bunch of other information like what modules are loaded, what handles are loaded, what threads are there, what environment variables am I using. This is really powerful. And I think you can develop some really compelling applications and go pretty deep with these sorts of tools.