performance counters as event sinks in Enterprise Instrumentation? -- dotnet performance

barnaby_morris NO[at]SPAM hotmail.com
11/4/2003 4:23:25 PM

I have been investigating the Microsoft Enterprise Instrumentation
Framework as a flexible logging solution for our software. In addition
to logging, we need to have performance counters for ongoing
monitoring by the operations staff. It seems to me that performance
counters can be thought of as an aggregation of events. This suggests
that I should be able to increment performance counters using a custom
event sink. This would allow the performance counters to be determined
at configuration time instead of during coding and additional counters
could be added (assuming the corresponding event was being sourced)
without code changes. I am a little surprised that such a sink is not
included with the Logging Block package. Is there something obvious
I'm missing here? Will I introduce significant overhead by doing this
instead of hard coding my performance counter handling into my
application? Does Microsoft have plans to write a performance counter
event sink?

Thanks,

Nick Wienholt
11/5/2003 9:29:26 PM

The WMI event sink can be theoretically hooked up with System Monitor, but I
haven't actually seen it done. There are details at [1] of hooking up WMI
into System Monitor - I'm not sure if the EIF WMI classes meet the criteria
that is listed.

A dedicated performance counter sink for EIF would be a lot easier that the
Reverse Adapter path, and would be a good addition to EIF.

Nick Wienholt, MVP
Maximizing .NET Performance
http://www.apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=217
Sydney Deep .NET User Group www.sdnug.org

[1]
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/wmisdk/wmi/accessing_wmi_preinstalled_performance_classes.asp

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dotnet performance : performance counters as event sinks in Enterprise Instrumentation?