.NET Platform Monitoring

Applications developed with Microsoft technology use the .NET framework. This framework provides counters to measure and monitor performance of the applications. The .NET Framework has two main components:

·         The common language runtime

·         The .NET Framework class library

The common language runtime (CLR) is the foundation of the .NET Framework. You can think of the runtime as an agent that manages code at execution time, providing core services such as memory management, thread management, and remoting, while also enforcing strict type safety

and other forms of code accuracy that promote security and robustness. In fact, the concept of code management is a fundamental principle of the runtime. Code that targets the runtime is known as managed code, while code that does not target the runtime is known as unmanaged code. The

class library, the other main component of the .NET Framework, is a comprehensive, object-oriented collection of reusable types.

.NET performance counters are organized into nine important categories:

·         Exceptions:  Provides information about the exceptions thrown by the application.

·         Memory:  Provides information about the garbage collector.

·         Locks and Threads: Provide information about managed locks and threads used by the application.

·         Interop: Provides information about the application’s interaction with COM components, COM+ services, and type libraries.

·         JIT:  Provides information about code that has been compiled by the justin-time (JIT) compiler.

·         Loading: Provides information about assemblies, classes, and AppDomains that have been loaded.

·          Networking:  Provides information about the data sent and received over the network by the application.

·         Remoting:  Provides information about remote objects used by the application.

·         Security:  Gives a description about the security checks the CLR performs on the application.

When monitoring .NET applications, it is recommended to start monitoring from operating system counters that measure the utilization of the processors, the memory, the network, and the I/O devices. Then you can add .NET performance counters that cover every aspect of the CLR operations ranging from exception processing to security checking.

	Counter	Description
Exception	# of Excep Thrown/sec	Indicates the number of managed code exceptions thrown per second
	Throw to Catch Depth/Sec	Indicates the number of stack frames
Memory	Large Object Heap Size	Indicates the current size of the Large Object Heap in bytes
	# Bytes in all Heaps	Indicates the current memory allocated in bytes on the GC heaps.
	# of Pinned Objects	Indicates the number of pinned objects encountered in the last garbage collection (GC).
	% Time in GC	Indicates the percentage of elapsed time that was spent in performing a garbage collection (GC) since the last GC cycle.
Threads	# of Current Logical threads	Indicates the number of current .NET thread objects in the application.
	# of Current Physical Threads	Indicates the number of native OS threads created and owned by the CLR.
	# of Current Recognized Threads	Indicates the number of threads currently recognized by the CLR.
	# of Total Recognized Threads	Indicates the total number of threads recognized by the CLR since the start.
	Contention Rate/Sec	Indicates the rate at which threads in the runtime attempt to acquire a managed lock unsuccessfully
Loading	Current Assemblies	Indicates the number of assemblies that are loaded in the process.
	Rate of Assemblies	Indicates the rate at which assemblies are loaded into the memory per second.
	Bytes in Loader Heap	Indicates the number of bytes committed by the class loader.
Security	Total Runtime Checks	Indicates the percentage of elapsed time spent in performing runtime Code Access Security.
	Stack Walk Depth	Indicates the depth of the stack during that last runtime Code Access Security check.