How to fix weird "Production Breakpoints" errors in an Azure App Service?

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This article describes a curious fix I found to an issue where Application Insights (seemingly) crashes your Azure App Service, leaving behind interesting and non-descriptive errors in the Application Event Logs.

Problem

Table of Contents

Does your Application Insights look like this, too? Event logs full of “Production Breakpoints” with weird errors about named pipes?

In my case, the errors were something like these below:

IfFailRet(pNamedPipe->Read((BYTE*)&controlRequest, sizeof(SnapshotHolderControlStruct))) failed in function CSnapshotHolder::HandleNewPipeConnection: -2147024787

And:

CNamedPipe::Read - Read from named pipe failed: 0x8007006D.

These errors would always pop up at the same time the site would crash under fairly meager load of a hundred or so RPS (requests per second). Impossible to tell whether the errors were logged because of the crash, or the app service crashed because of the same thing that caused the errors…

After a quick investigation, Application Insights seemed to be the source (“Production Breakpoints”) for the error. I had never heard of AppInsights crashing an App Service, but we did eas

This didn’t completely remove the issue, but did stabilize the app service. But how to get rid of the errors for good?

There’s a simple fix, though! Or at least there was for me. Maybe it’ll help you as well!

Solution

Okay, so the solution for me was kind of weird – but easy.

Earlier, when I had first had Azure DevOps enable “Monitoring”, it would install AppInsights extension to the Azure App Service website.

That’s a horrible mistake. Don’t do that.

The extensions are extremely fragile. I’ve posted about that earlier: You wouldn’t believe these 3 solutions to fix the error “500.32”, and what they look like now!

Anyway – the extensions are kind of wild as they also add random application settings to your app service. And these settings have side effects – like in this case!

I had removed the extension, and we were using AppInsights with the SDK, i.e. without anything extra installed on the Azure App Service. But uninstalling the extension does not remove its Application Settings – which makes sense, because they DO have side effects, so you can’t really remove them, because some other functionality might be using them as well!

Oh, what fun.

Anyway, long story short – remove this property “SnapshotDebugger_EXTENSION_VERSION”:

And with any luck, you’re good.

Author
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Antti K. Koskela

Developer / Architect / Consultant at Koskila / Valo Solutions Ltd. / Norppandalotti Software Co / Alter - Experience Ideas Ltd.

Antti Koskela is a proud digital native nomadic millennial full stack developer (is that enough funny buzzwords? That's definitely enough funny buzzwords!), who works as a Solutions Architect for Valo Intranet, the product that will make you fall in love with your intranet.

He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been bending and twisting SharePoint into different shapes since MOSS. Nowadays he's not only working on SharePoint, but also on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365 and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Office Development.

This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.

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