Monitor Performance of your Apps at run-time…with PerfMon!

Ben Day has a blog post on a really interesting idea: using Performance Monitor (perfmon) to monitor the performance of your applications at run-time.

You can create your own custom perfmon counters and record various things in your application. Then, if a client running your application has performance issues, you’ve got something concrete to go on. You get all the benefits of perfmon: graphing, max/min recording over time, comparison with other system variables etc.

It’s one of those “well, duh, obvious” ideas, but it’s never occurred to me before. It’s worth putting the time in to wrap this functionality, as I see it being useful in loads of different scenarios.

You can read Ben’s full post here, in which he credits this CodeProject article on how to create the counters (also worth a read).