Image containing core tools

[paulmey]

Describe the Problem

Our team prefers to have diagnostics tools available in production images to be able to root-cause and diagnose issues without needing to download bits from the internet into production environments. Therefore, dotnet-trace, dotnet-counters, dotnet-gcdump and dotnet-dump are downloaded in an SDK image during build using dotnet tool install .... Specific versions of the tools are installed downloaded. The final aspnet image copies the downloaded tools from the SDK image.

Recently security restrictions are now in place to even lock down internet access during build time and require teams to use Azure DevOps Artifact feeds instead of nuget.org. This is inconvenient in container builds, because now tokens have to be acquired and passed into the container builds. For pipelines this is not that hard, but now users who want to build locally also need tokens (which is also restricted (i.e. made harder, but not impossible) due to security concerns).

Describe the Solution

It would be convenient to have the core set of tools (assuming they include the ones above) also available as a container image so that these tools can be more easily included in container builds in restricted environments where unauthenticated nuget mirrors are not available.

[lbussell]

Hi @paulmey. Does dotnet-monitor address your use-case? It is a sidecar container that contains endpoints for trace, dump, gcdump, etc. I do not think it contains counters but @wiktork or @jander-msft can speak to that.

The image is published out of this repo and you can find the tags here: https://github.com/dotnet/dotnet-docker/blob/main/README.monitor.md

[paulmey]

This will likely work for us. I'm not familiar at all with dotnet-monitor, but I'll try it out. I think dotnet-counters is the least important of the tools I listed.

[jander-msft]

I do not think it contains counters but @wiktork or @jander-msft can speak to that.

/metrics and /livemetrics are the corresponding routes depending on how you need to get counter/metrics values.

[richlander]

I've seen these tools installed several times. I think it would very useful to have at least one image that contained them so that it would be trivial to do a one-line COPY to acquire them. In essence, make them registry accessible.