.NET Trace Collect

This skill helps developers diagnose production performance issues by recommending the right diagnostic tools for their environment, guiding data collection, and suggesting analysis approaches. It does not analyze code for anti-patterns or perform the analysis itself.

When to Use

• A developer needs to investigate a production performance issue (high CPU, memory leak, slow requests, excessive GC, networking errors, etc.)
• Choosing the right diagnostic tool for a specific runtime, OS, or deployment topology
• Setting up and running diagnostic tool commands for data collection
• Understanding trade-offs between available tools (e.g. PerfView vs dotnet-trace)
• Collecting diagnostics from containerized or Kubernetes workloads

When Not to Use

• Reviewing source code for performance anti-patterns (use a code review skill instead)
• Benchmarking during development (e.g. BenchmarkDotNet setup)
• Analyzing collected trace or dump files (this skill recommends tools for analysis, but does not perform it)

Inputs

Input	Required	Description
Symptom	Yes	What the developer is observing (high CPU, memory growth, slow requests, hangs, excessive GC, HTTP 5xx errors, networking timeouts, connection failures, assembly loading failures, etc.)
Runtime	Yes	.NET Framework or modern .NET (and version, especially whether .NET 10+)
OS	Yes	Windows or Linux
Deployment	Yes	Non-container, container, or Kubernetes
Admin privileges	Recommended	Whether the developer has admin/root access on the target machine
Repro characteristics	Recommended	Whether the issue is easy to reproduce or requires a long time to manifest

Workflow

Step 1: Understand the environment

Determine or ask the developer to clarify: