Glimpse, rebuilt.
You used to be able to open the hood on one request and see everything it did. Then the way we build changed, and that view went away. This is the story of why we built it back.
Then.
Around 2011, a tool called Glimpse put a small bar at the bottom of every ASP.NET page. Click it, and you saw what the server did for that page: the route, the action, the views, and every SQL query. It answered the one question that matters when a page is slow: what did this request actually do?
What we kept, and what we changed.
- 01
Drop-in, not a platform.
Two lines in .NET, one in Node, one provider in React. No agent, no collector, no account.
- 02
Built on open standards.
OpenTelemetry shapes and the W3C traceparent header. Anything that speaks OTLP can join.
- 03
Opinionated.
It does not just show you the data. It points at the N+1, the duplicate, and the slow query.
- 04
Yours.
Your data stays on your machine until you send it somewhere. On in development only.
- 05
AI-ready, not AI-bundled.
No AI inside. A read-only, redacted door your own agent can use, if you open it.
Standing on good shoulders.
- Glimpsethe original "see inside the request" tool for ASP.NET
- MiniProfilerfast, focused timing
- ELMAHerror logging done right
WizeLens is an independent project. It is not affiliated with Glimpse, MiniProfiler, or ELMAH, or the people who made them.