DevOps for .NET applications

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a way of working where the people who build software also take part in running it. Developers and operations share responsibility for the whole lifecycle, from design and deployment to monitoring and maintenance.

Many companies used to split this work between teams. One team built the features, another hosted the system, and a third tested everything before a release. Every handoff added waiting time, and a bug found in production could travel between teams before anyone fixed it.

With DevOps, the team that ships a feature is also responsible for it in production. That does not mean everyone needs the same skills, and different strengths and interests are still a good thing. What changes is that everyone cares about how the product runs.

A successful DevOps setup tends to give you:

• Better responsiveness to change
• Efficient operations
• Fewer bottlenecks

Monitoring is what ties it together. A team that deploys often needs to know quickly if a release made things worse, and it needs that information where it already works. That is where elmah.io fits in.

Mark every deployment

Add one step to your pipeline and elmah.io records the version of every release. The deployment tracking overview then shows when you released and how each version performed, so you can see which release caused more errors than the one before it.

There are guides for GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, GitLab, Bitbucket Pipelines, Octopus Deploy, Atlassian Bamboo, Kudu, PowerShell and the elmah.io CLI. Anything else can call the REST API.

Catch regressions fast

The New Errors metric on each deployment shows the errors that did not exist before the release. When a bug is introduced in a new version, elmah.io notifies you right away, through email, Slack, Microsoft Teams or any of the other integrations in the App Store.

You do not have to watch a dashboard after every release. Notifications for new errors come to you, and each error links to the stack trace and the request that caused it.

Let an agent watch production after each deploy

With the elmah.io AI Plugin for Claude Code or Cursor, you can ask for the deployment watchdog when a release goes out. It is a background agent that watches for regressions, alerts you right away on fatal errors or downtime, and reports HEALTHY or UNHEALTHY once enough data has come in.

The plugin also has a post-deployment check skill, if you would rather ask for a one-off health check after shipping. Install the plugin in Claude Code with two commands:

claude plugin marketplace add elmahio/elmah-io-ai-plugin
claude plugin install elmah-io@elmah-io

The plugin and the MCP server are included on every plan and are currently in beta. Read about the AI Plugin.

Cover what does not throw

A scheduled job or a function that stops running does not log an error. Heartbeats notify you when a check-in is missed, and uptime monitoring pings your sites from up to 5 regions, every 5 minutes, and logs an error when a site is down.

Both trigger the same notifications and integrations as your application errors, so one setup covers the lot.

From the terminal and from CI

The elmah.io CLI is a .NET tool for searching, tailing and exporting messages and for creating deployments. Use it on your machine or in scripts: dotnet tool install --global Elmah.Io.Cli.

Scripts and pipelines can also call the MCP server with an API key as a Bearer token, for example to check for new errors after a release. Read about the CLI or how to call the MCP server with an API key.

Frequently asked questions