PerformanceCounter specifications ?

Question

I am looking for the standard PerformanceCounter specs. Through the performance monitor application that comes with WinXP, I can see that there are loads of performance counters out there (on a WinXP machine).

Is there some reference guide on those counters (at least the OS and .Net counters) ?

Thanks in advance,
Joannès

Answer 1

I am also wondering why the .Net specific performance counters (all the ".NET CLR foo" counters) cannot be accessed in a more object-oriented fashion (like enumerations or constants provided within .Net).

Joannès

Answer 2

Are you referring to OS counters or application counters?  Information on OS counters should be somewhere in the windows documentation, and information on application counters should be available in the documentation for that application, I am unaware of a spec where they are described together.

Answer 3

Actually I am refering to the OS independant performance counters which include the .Net performance counters, and the basic hardware (memory, processor, disk).

Joannès

Answer 4

Here's a place that describes the Windows counters:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/counter/counters1_lkxw.asp?frame=true

And here's something similar for the Framework:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpgenref/html/gngrfPerformanceCounters.asp?frame=true

To find these I searched on msdn.microsoft.com for a specific counter plus "performance counter".  For example: ".net clr memory performance counter" found me the Framework page.

David

Answer 5

Did these URLs answer your question?  If not, could you please provide some more clarification?

Answer 6

Well, yes (mostly) and no (a bit). Yes because those pages indeed gather the various performance counters in a readable fashion. No, because this documentation is nothing more than the concatenation of the intregated help associated to the Performance Monitor app in WinXP. It would have been interesting to have a more structured and detailed documentation. In my view, those pages do not meet the usual .Net documentation quality (which quite quite high).

Joannes

Answer 7

Hi,

BUG: NextValue method of .NET PerformanceCounter object returns zero

SYMPTOMS The NextValue method of the .NET PerformanceCounter object may return zero (0) for the following LogicalDisk or PhysicalDisk performance counters:

•	% Disk Time
•	% Disk Read Time
•	% Disk Write Time
•	% Idle Time
•	Avg. Disk Queue Length
•	Avg. Disk Read Queue Length
•	Avg. Disk Write Queue Length

Is there any way I can find the disk utilization (i.e 100 - % Idle Time) through the performance counters available in .NET or by any means through .NET framework. I will be thankfull if you can help me with this bug of .Net Performance counters.

Rishi