How to Enable WF 4 Performance Counters

Question

I'm having difficulty enabling the performance counters for WF 4.  We are using a WorkflowServiceHost if it's relevant.  

We start up the host (windows service) that contains the WorkflowServiceHost and after this has completed and the host has started a workflow instance, in PerfMon we are unable to select the WF 4 related counters.    What we see in PerfMon is in the "Add Counters" dialog, we see the performance objects of "Windows Workflow Foundation" (believed to be related to .Net 3.x version of WF) and "WF (System.Workflow) 4.0.0.0".  We select WF (System.Workflow) 4.0.0.0 and see the counters but no instances are ever associated with the counters.  All the instances are greyed out.

Answer 1

Hi,

According to PM Dave Cliffe.
"we actually don’t have any performance counters related to WF 4.0 (the new System.Activities model).  The System.Workflow perf counters are related to WF 3/3.5.  "

If you want to monitor the performance of WF4 workflow:
"You can get most (if not all) of that information about a particular WF instance through Tracking, although you’ll have to calculate the quantity over time yourself.  A custom tracking profile should be sufficient with our EtwTrackingParticipant, or you can optionally write your own TrackingParticipant to log the information elsewhere (e.g. to the data source of your dashboard)."

Regards

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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. Microsoft Online Community Support. My Blog:http://xhinker.com

Answer 2

I tried using those counters too with WF 4 and AppFabric but the instances never show up there.

I was wondering if you figured out a way to do this?

Thanks,

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If this answers your question, please use the "Answer" button to say so | Ben Cline

Answer 3

Actually, we've done some more work here in .NET 4.5.  We have added performance counters for WorkflowServiceHost specifically (the "WorkflowServiceHost (4.0.0.0)" group).

In particular, we added:

Average Workflow Load Time, Average Workflow Persist Time, Workflows Aborted, Aborted/sec, Completed, Completed/sec, Created, Created/sec, Executing, Idle/sec, In Memory, Loaded, Loaded/sec, Persisted, Persisted/sec, Suspended, Suspended/sec, Terminated, Terminated/sec, Unloaded, Unloaded/sec.