Windows services performance monitoring

Monitoring our Windows Services and their business transactions is mission-critical to us. NET applications. NET web request. It is very simple for services like Retrace to identify each individual web request and track the performance of them. Windows Services have no defined start or end to the work that they do. They typically start and run continuously until the server is turned off. In these use cases, tracking web requests can be done similarly as they are for ASP. NET without and special definition of the transactions.

Windows Services usually follow several common usage patterns. By identifying these patterns, you can quickly evaluate the best way to identify operations in your code. Think of an operation as a unit of work that is repeated over and over. You need to identify them and then potentially monitor each different operation that your service executes.

Most Windows Services are likely to perform multiple operations. I would suggest breaking them down to the smallest logical units of work. It is better if you monitor smaller units of work.

This is similar to monitoring each web request in your ASP. NET application versus monitoring the performance of the application as a whole. For example, our monitoring agent for Windows is a Windows Service. It does a ton of different operations on a schedule every few seconds. Each one of those tasks that it performs should be defined as unique operations so you can track everything that it does.

Once you have identified the operations you would like to track, you will need to make a few minor code changes.

Basically, you just wrap your code with an object and give it a name. For more information and code examples, please see our docs about using Retrace for tracking non-web transactions.

Retrace utilizes lightweight. There is a greater performance impact to discovery as a result of all the extra discoveries and overhead for maintaining those objects. As long as you don't have too many of those services being monitored on one server or in total as I don't know how many servers you have this shouldn't be a problem.

To just throw a number out there I would say that I wouldn't worry too much about or so monitored services per server. So if you choose option one and you don't target only servers that have the service lots of extra monitoring or you choose option two and have all the extra discoveries I'm not sure which has extra impact or if cookdown comes into play or not with either scenario that could make one preferable over the other.

You don't want to stuff to many objects into a class either. There's also yest another option where you just run a script that checks for all the services you want to monitor and alerts if any of them are having issues. This will likely scale the best but I've never done any sort of in depth impact testing for any of these scenarios.

Just thought experiment in my own head. It is a difficult task that spreads over servers in the range. I do not know how many of our servers have custom services or how many services there are per server, but I started with one of our most complex applications and it had 22 custom services on one server. I doubt this will be the case for most though and I expect as you said. Would it be a good idea to create a class Windows Service per application , add monitors per service, disable its monitors as default and override each monitor to the specific server it is running on?

Or perhaps doing what you did, as I understood it; creating one class to host the monitors, turn monitors off, then overriding each monitor to enabled on each server? Is it possible to run discovery off for a class and instead manually set where each service is located? I am also confused as what a "Windows Service" class actually does other than host the monitors.

So, if I'm understanding you correctly; one of these:. That would certainly make it easy, but I don't think I agree with you on the half day's work. For more information, see Before You Begin Monitoring. NET Applications. Use the. NET Application Performance Monitoring template in scenarios where you have to monitor web-based applications. These scenarios include the following monitoring processes:. You might have applications that must be running at all times.

NET Application Performance Monitoring template to ensure that your applications are reliable, have no exceptions, and meet service level agreements SLAs , in short, that they perform correctly on the computers where they are installed.

You want to ensure that your customers are having quality web experiences. By creating or editing existing templates, you can extend your server-side monitoring by adding client-side monitoring that measures the browser experience of your customers.

By default, the. You can be enable, disable, and modify monitors in the Advanced Configuration page of the. All data collected by the. For each of the application groups that you create by using the. NET Monitoring. The Application Monitoring folder contains the default views and subfolders that provide health state, Performance views, and alerts related to the application components in the application group.

By using the top-level Application Group State view, you can see the health of the individual components and the monitoring configurations that have been enabled. The state of each object matches the state of the targeted object that has the worst health state so that you see the worst state of the monitors that are running. If one or more of the components are shown with an error while at least one other component is healthy, it could indicate a problem with that particular component, such as a credential issue.

If all of the components are unhealthy, it could indicate a problem with the infrastructure, such as network connectivity issues. To view the state of the individual monitors, open the Health Explorer for each component.

Drill down to the unhealthy monitors to see what is making your application unhealthy. For more information, see Monitoring. When you run the. NET Application Performance Monitoring template, you have to provide values for options as listed in the following tables. Each table represents a single page in the wizard. The following options are available on the General Properties page of the wizard. The following options are available on the What to Monitor page of the wizard.

The following options are available on the Server-Side Configuration page of the wizard. The following options are available on the Advanced Settings for server-side monitoring page of the wizard. The following options are available on the Server-Side Modifying Settings page of the wizard.

The buttons for namespaces, exception tracking, and critical exceptions are unavailable because these can only be set at the application-group level, not at the component level.

For System Center SP1 only: You can customize these settings if you are configuring monitoring for Windows services. For each application type there are several transaction types you can choose to monitor.

The following options are available:. NET Web Page page of the wizard. NET Web Service page of the wizard. MVC page of the wizard. The following options are available on the Transaction Properties for the Add Function page of the wizard. The following options are available on the Client-Side Configuration page of the wizard. The following options are available on the Advance Settings for Client-Side Monitoring page of the wizard. The following options are available on the Enable Client-Side Monitoring page of the wizard.

The following options are available on the Client-Side Modifying Settings page of the wizard. The Summary page of the wizard lists the settings you have configured for the. If you want to change any of these settings, click Previous or the template page until you reach the page with the settings that you want to change. For the procedure to run the. After you configure monitoring for an application, these three views will help you get started with the monitoring experience.

Skip to main content. Some processes will show up with their session set as "?. Monitoring tools can consume this counter by Using Performance Counters. You can submit feedback for this feature through the Feedback Hub. Skip to main content. This browser is no longer supported. Download Microsoft Edge More info. Contents Exit focus mode. Is this page helpful? Please rate your experience Yes No. Any additional feedback?

Note If you're using Windows 10, version or later or Windows Server or later, you won't need to enable the registry key. Note Not all processes are included.