Can Performance Counters track time taken along with a string idenitifer?

Question

I need to record the time taken by a task and it's been sugguested I use windows performance counters.

I need to record the time taken to solve a given MathProblem. The Solve methods first line will start the StopWatch and the last line will Stop it.

When I record the time taken to solve the problem I need to record the time along with the ProblemId (a string).

Can performance counters be use the record data like this? Will the perfmon graph plot the times along with a idenitifer? so when I click or hover over the graph point it will show the ProblemID?

Thanks in advance

public class MathProblem
{
    public string ProblemID;

    public void Solve()
    {
        StopWatch sw = StopWatch.StartNew();

        sw.Stop();
        //Log to performance counter with ProblemID
    }
}

Answer 1

No, the system performance counters do not work for such a case if you want to separate counters per problem ID. While is true that an instanced category can track separate counters for each instance and the display can show the counters for each category and for _Total (which is an aggregated category you create in code and make sure you add all individual instances to _Total as well), this infrastructure is designed for fairly stable instances, the most volatile example being a process. If your ProblemIDs show up and vanish frequently (ie. the ID is very volatile, changing more often than a few times per hour) tracking this kind of volatility under the perfmon infrastructure is just not going to work. The clients take a snapshot of the instance names and then look for changes in that instance names space, so if the names are volatile, all clients will track basically nothing: will track some ProblemId that happen to exists at the moment the snapshot was captured, then nothing more since the snapshot instances will be gone and no new instance is captured.

Answer 2

Forgive me if this seems like a simplistic approach, but for what it's worth (and based on Remus' information that perfmon will not do what you want), I've always approached this type of problem by writing results to a CSV file. This can then be imported directly into Excel and Excel will analyse and graph the data in whatever manner is most appropriate. Any other spreadsheet program will work, of course.

This way you get sophisticated analysis capabilities without having to write code for anything more than creating a text file; unless you want to write some VBA in Excel to help process the data.

I may have misunderstood your requirements but you could append your results to what is effectively a log file (in a CSV format) and simply add to that each time your program is run, which would have more or less the same effect as creating performance counter datapoints.

If you want to get more sophisticated, you can of course inject results directly into Excel sheets with a more complicated solution.