Public API for creating DiagnosticsClient from IPC endpoint

[mstefarov]

Background and Motivation

I build custom diagnostic tooling for my company using TraceEvent library. Currently our tools can show either a "live" view of a process on the same PC (using TraceEventSession) or open previously-recorded ETL/nettrace files.

I would love to be able to provide a live view for mobile apps as well by connecting to dsrouter. The Microsoft.Diagnostics.NETCore.Client package is very promising, but unfortunately all APIs related to IPC are marked "internal".

Proposed Feature

Expose APIs for creating a DiagnosticsClient from IPC endpoint. The minimal API surface is probably new DiagnosticsClient(string diagnosticPort), but something more flexible — like exposing IpcEndpoint and its implementations — would also be welcome.

Usage Examples

Creating custom tools that interact with dsrouter, such as live monitoring for processes that run on Android/macOS/iOS. For a specific example, we use tools to diagnose performance problems / network issues / authentication issues in mobile apps, in interactive scenarios where stepping through the whole app with a debugger is not practical.

If public API is not available in the Microsoft.Diagnostics.NETCore.Client package, I could try pulling the whole dotnet/diagnostics repo as a submodule, and including its source code directly into our diagnostic tools. That seems like a much messier, harder-to-maintain option.

[Bluezen]

This issue looks related to this one, created in April 2021 😓... Perhaps we ought to create a MR to facilitate progress on this matter? Additionally, I would love not having to use reflection to access DiagnosticsClient methods like GetProcessInfo.

[xoofx]

I concur with this issue as I'm encountering the same problem of having to use System.Reflection to use a custom connection.

I have created the PR #5070 to address this issue.

[tommcdon]

Reactivating to track documenting the api