Performance Counter Monitoring Keeps Applications Robust

Performance is the Alpha and Omega

Application and service performance is at the heart of any IT-based business's success. As the performance of an IT work environment increases, so does the productivity of its workers. Slow applications, however, can thwart your company's potential.

With its performance counters, Windows allows administrators to find bottlenecks in their networks and thus improve the performance of their systems and applications. Windows' own Performance Monitor (perfmon.exe) lets you graphically display the data made available by performance counters. In order for you to obtain a quick overview of this data and receive the notifications that go with it, performance counters must deliver an extraordinary amount of data, which can consequently lead to bottlenecks in your system.

You therefore need a professional monitoring tool such as the PRTG Performance Counter.

Easy-to-read display

PRTG first reads the available performance counters in your Windows systems and then supplies various workstations with easy-to-read graphics of the performance statistics of your applications.

You can use PRTG to determine where bottlenecks arise, when applications crash, and where the causes of problems are to be found - in the network, hardware, or application itself.

Set limits for individual counters to receive notifications before something really goes wrong with your network, and have reports for previous time periods generated automatically. With PRTG, all work gets done in a proactive manner. PRTG provides for increased application stability and uninterrupted work processes, as well as a sound decision-making basis for optimizations to your company's own software.

With PRTG, everyone will work with peace of mind.

User-defined Windows performance counters with the PerfCounter Custom Sensor

Performance counters, e.g. on CPU load and network card traffic with default sensors

Performance data for applications, services, and the operating system

Information on applications running on an IIS server such as Microsoft SharePoint or SSRS

Establish an overview

You get an overview of the performance data of your applications: both individual ones and those spanning several workstations.

Increase security

If an application’s performance drops, you can promptly search for the causes and prevent a crash.

Stabilize business processes

Continuous monitoring and rapid fine-tuning provide company employees with a stable and high-performance work base.

Discover and solve problems

Software developers and administrators will troubleshoot software components and hardware configurations, and take appropriate actions to optimize them.

Develop your firm’s own applications

Collect company-wide data on the performance of applications developed in-house, and reach conclusions regarding the company’s future software development plans.

Be alerted automatically

Should business-critical applications (defined by you) take a hit, you’ll be notified at once.

Read and analyze measured values

Performance counters are time-sensitive, measured values administered by Windows that deliver information on the performance of operating systems, applications, services, and hardware. PRTG automatically reads this performance data in real-time via the Remote Registry Service, and then makes it available for analysis. This allows sysadmins to isolate problem areas and plan improvements to their network infrastructures.

The performance counter method

There are a few good reasons for using performance counters as monitoring technology for Windows Server: WMI, Microsoft's default method for monitoring Windows systems, uses an excessive amount of network resources and is sometimes unstable. PRTG offers so-called "hybrid sensors" by default, which first attempt to request the desired data (such as CPU load) via performance counters, and only resort to WMI if performance counters are unavailable or cannot be read for some other reason.

Using custom sensors, administrators often find the performance counter method easier to configure, for only the desired counters need to be entered into the sensor settings. Finding the name of the desired performance counter is extremely simple, as we explain in the following article: https://kb.paessler.com/en/topic/50673. The user-defined WMI sensor requires an entire WQL query and is therefore somewhat more complicated to configure.

From the point of view of performance, SNMP is definitely our top choice for monitoring Windows devices, but in certain cases this monitoring technology is inappropriate. Some data is simply not available on Windows machines via SNMP; in such cases, performance counters are often the better bet.

Using PRTG as the perfect performance counter 

All performance counters built into Windows are fully supported by PRTG. Take a look at your Windows Performance Monitor as described in the aforementioned knowledge base article (link included above): Sometimes it's incredible to think of just how many performance counters there are for Windows apps! These also include those which do not come from Microsoft itself, for such counters often provide surprising insights into applications and processes.

More information on how to configure the PerfCounter Custom Sensor and other performance counter sensors can be found in our handbook.