I've been thinking of creating an application that sits and waits for process start, and after that times how long it takes before an event such as window activation happens.
I'm interested in measuring real time performance of applications. Over time, as more and more software is loaded onto a machine, the machine becomes progressively slower. My interest is in measuring exactly how much slower is it becoming. To give an example, if I start MS Word it takes 1.5 seconds from process creation to window becoming active. I'd like to be able to generate a graph that shows me the trend of whether this is getting better or worse over time. Of course this is highly dependent on what else I'm doing at the time. But over hundreds of runs (as it sits in the background throughout the year) the averages should be useful.
I'm also interested in putting metric/logging to support the following user comment: "my computer is slow all of a sudden". And when I walk to it it's perfectly fine. I know they are not lying, but without more data there isn't much I can do.
In the last 10 years, I've noticed that every single apparently unique idea I've had has been implemented already by someone else. The thing is, I could not find anything like this yet. I'm sure there is something out there. I just don't want to reinvent the wheel if I don't have to.