Implementing a custom performance counter

After some playing around, I’ve finally managed to get my custom performance counter up and running so I thought I’d share the basics.

For IMayBeLate, I want to get an idea of how many emails are being generated. The second version of my site (2.0) isn’t live yet, but I thought it might be a nice metric to see the number of emails, push messages and SMSs being generated when the site does go live. To implement this, I decided to try a custom performance counter as it seems ideally suited.

There are two steps. First, a new category of counters must be created. Secondly, your performance counters are added to that category.

First, create a category and add a counter to it.

   1: if (!PerformanceCounterCategory.Exists("IMayBeLate"))

   2: {

   3:     CounterCreationDataCollection counters = new CounterCreationDataCollection();  

   4:         

   5:     CounterCreationData totalOps = new CounterCreationData();

   6:     totalOps.CounterName = "# emails sent"; 

   7:     totalOps.CounterHelp = "Total number of emails sent by the EmailProcessor"; 

   8:     totalOps.CounterType = PerformanceCounterType.NumberOfItems64; 

   9:     counters.Add(totalOps);

  10:  

  11:     PerformanceCounterCategory.Create("IMayBeLate", "Counters related to IMayBeLate", PerformanceCounterCategoryType.SingleInstance, counters);

  12: }

.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
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.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
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This counter is a PerformanceCounterType.NumberOfItems64 type, which is one that just holds an increasing value.

Next, create an instance of the performance counter.

   1: PerformanceCounter totalEmails = null;

   2:  

   3: totalEmails = new PerformanceCounter("IMayBeLate", "# emails sent", RoleEnvironment.CurrentRoleInstance.Id, false);

   4: totalEmails.MachineName = ".";

   5: totalEmails.ReadOnly = false;

Once you have created the counter, you can increment its value with ease.

   1: totalEmails.Increment();

When you open the Performance Monitor in Windows, you should now be able to select from a new category of counters called IMayBeLate and add it.

I plan on deploying my application to Windows Azure in the future. This article https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/common-tasks/performance-profiling/ describes how to go about setting up performance Counters in Azure. Hopefully it won’t be too difficult!

EDIT My apologies for the inconsistent code syntax highlighting here – I’m trying out a few different plug-ins for Windows Live Writer.