Web diagnostics with Glimpse

Glimpse is a great tool to get more info what is going on your web server. And it is easy to use: for my demo, I created a new ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application (it works also with other MVC versions, and also with ASP.NET Web Forms) with the Internet Application template (again, it works also with the other templates). Then I added the NuGet package Glimpse.Mvc4. Finally I pressed F5, the application started and - nothing changed! No hint of Glimpse.
The reason is that Glimpse has to be enabled first. For this I opened the page Glimpse.axd in the root of my web application:

I clicked on Turn Glimpse On, went back to my application home page, refreshed it, and now in the bottom right corner was the Glimpse icon: . Clicking on this icon, I got the Glimpse window, displaying several tabs with some info used to produce the current web page:

NOTE: Glimpse stores the info if it is enabled or not in a cookie called glimpsePolicy. That means, when you later access the page again, Glimpse will be enabled already (or not).

When you look at the Glimpse tabs, some like Request, Server or Trace appear familiar from ASP.NET Tracing. But there are also some other tabs. Just play around with them a little bit.

Entity Framework Plugin

As useful as Glimpse is so far - that is not all. You can easily add additional tabs to Glimpse. A complete list of all available packages can be found on the Glimpse Extensions page.
The Internet Application template I used above contains some database access in combination with the user stuff (Log in, Register). Therefore I added now the Entity Framework Plugin.
I just had to download the NuGet package Glimpse.EF5. After compiling I refreshed the home page and found a new SQL tab in the Glimpse window. Only the tab was disabled since no database access was done for the home page.
Then I logged in, but again the SQL tab was disabled. This happened because there several requests executed for the log in, and only the last request didn't access the database. For problems like this Glimpse provides the History tab:

Here I selected the correct request, clicked Inspect, and finally the SQL tab was enabled:

Great, isn't it? A lot of useful info, and no effort to get them.