I'm working with a system that consists of several applications and services, almost all using a SQL database. Windows services do different things at different times, and I would like to track them. Meaning that on some deployed systems we see the machine running high on CPU, we see that the sql process is running high, but we can't be sure about which service is responsible for it.
I wonder if Performance Counters are good for this job. Basically I would like to be able to see at a certain moment which service woke up and is processing something.
It seems to me that I can end up having a perfcounter that only has the value 0 or 1 for each service to show if it is doing something, but this doesn't seem like a normal usage for perfcounters.
Are performance counters suitable? Do you think I should track this in a different way?
Thanks for the help.
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388answers:
3If your monitoring framework/approach already centers around monitoring performance counters, this is a viable approach.
Personally I find more detailed instrumentation necessary to really understand what's happening in my services (though maybe that has to do with the nature of my services).
I use .NET Logging Framework because it's simple and can write to multiple targets including log files, the event log, and a TCP socket (I have a simple monitor that listens on the logging socket for each app server and shows me in real-time what's happening).
Performance Counters are attractive because they are really lightweight, but as you say, they only allow you to capture numeric values. Sure, there's a slew of different types of values you can record, such as averages, deltas and totals, but they have to be numbers.
If you need more information than that, you must resort to some other type of instrumentation. In your case, it sounds like your need goes more in that direction.
If your services don't wake up and suspend themselves too often, it sounds like informational message to a custom event log might be a good idea. Create a custom event log for the application if you expect a fair amount of these so as to not flood the regular Application event log.
The .NET Trace API will be a better option if you expect the instrumentation to generate too much data for the normal event log. You can configure your application(s) to trace or not based on app/web.config, although a change will require a restart of the app. This is a good option if you only wish to use the instrumentation for troubleshooting, but it otherwise generates too much data or if tracing itself degrades performance too much. Another good thing about the Tracing API is that you can Trace on multiple levels, so even if you have written code to Trace very verbosely, you will only see that verbose trace data if you enable verbose tracing. That gives you better control of just what is being traced.
Eric J has a good point. I think if you really want to capture "timing" performance you'll have to use some other sort of logging and use start and stop time logs. I personally like log4net though it can be a pain to configure the first time around