Windows Performance Counter Configuration Extension

About Windows Performance Counters

Performance Counters, in Windows operating systems, provides an information about health of operating system, application, service or any other component. The counter data can help determine system bottlenecks and fine-tune system and application performance.

What it does

This extension will help in configuring available performance counters, exposed by various applications or operating system itself for Dotnet Machine Agent.

How it works

Dotnet machine agent provides a way to monitor any available performance counter in windows machine and send it to controller as a custom metrics. This extension will help in selecting any available performance counter in windows machine and adds to machine agent configuration file. The machine agent configuration file by default located at,

For Windows Server 2008 or later%ProgramData%\AppDynamics\DotNetAgent

For Windows Server 2003,%AllUsersProfile%\Application Data\AppDynamics\ DotNetAgent

The Windows Performance Counter Configuration Tool (or CCT) is a stand-alone executable, which requires dot net 4.0 to be installed on the machine. We can launch the executable by double click on it. The extension tool requires administrative permissions, based on security settings.

Note

We need to restart coordinator service after making any changes in configuration for performance counters.

DotNet 4.0 needs to be installed on the machine to run this configuration tool. This extension tool is supposed to work on following windows machines,

Windows Server 2003 (32 and 64 bit) Windows Server 2008 R2 (32 and 64 bit)Windows 7Windows 8 and 2012

1. Once launched it will display the list of all available Performance Counter Categories, as shown in following image,

2. We can scroll, filter or sort the available categories. Once we select any category it will load all available counters for selected category,

3. We can click on checkbox “Show instances” on left to display all available instances with counters for selected category. We can then be able to select and add any specific instance by doing double click on any row.

Double click on any counter to add it to the list of counters to be added in config.xml on right side of window.

4. Remove counters already added to the config.xml by unchecking the counter on right hand side.

5. Save configuration to update the xml in config.xml

6. We can copy the xml to clip-board to paste manually in any other document.

7. We can sort out columns on performance counter category and performance counter listings, for easy navigation.