"Always On" Setting, Continuous WebJobs and New Relic

Question

I have a couple of continuous web jobs which are currently stopping. I know the reason for this: I haven't got "Always On" turned on in my web site settings and the sites eventually unload.

The problem is that I also use New Relic for site monitoring, and their agent that collects data stops working when "Always On" is switched on.

So a catch-22: have the webjobs work but no performance and error monitoring, or lose the webjobs and have the monitoring.

Trying to keep HTTP traffic going to my site by loading a URL doesn't seem to stop the webjob unloading.

Does anybody know how I could get the best of both worlds?

Answer 1

This ended up being simpler than I thought once I stopped thinking about how I could get both things to work on the one web site when there's actually no need!

In the end it was far easier just to create a new, empty web site to house the webjobs. These could be kept "Always On" without affecting the main web site.

Answer 2

This is a catch 22. The main problem is "Always On" has to be turned off because of the way that Azure Web Sites work. There is nothing that can be configured and/or coded into the agent that will affect the way it works at this time. Microsoft is performing some updates to Azure in the near future, and we are hopeful that some of the changes will help with issues like this.

About the only thing that I can suggest is to create some automation to not only load a URL, but perform whatever action on the site is necessary to keep the webjob active. It is possible that the New Relic Synthetics option would be able to help with this when it is released, but there's no way to say for sure at this time. In the mean-time you might want to look at other automation tools, or possibly building a Ruby application, that can open a page and perform the necessary actions to keep the application active.

Sorry there's not better news for you.