Azure: Using System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounter - azure

Question

I'm aware of the Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics performance monitoring. I'm looking for something more real-time though like using the System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounter
The idea is that a the real-time information will be sent upon a AJAX request.
Using the performance counters available in azure: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh411520
The following code works (or at least in the Azure Compute Emulator, I haven't tried it in a deployment to Azure):
protected PerformanceCounter FDiagCPU = new PerformanceCounter("Processor", "% Processor Time", "_Total");
protected PerformanceCounter FDiagRam = new PerformanceCounter("Memory", "Available MBytes");
protected PerformanceCounter FDiagTcpConnections = new PerformanceCounter("TCPv4", "Connections Established");
Further down in the MSDN page is another counter I would like to use:
Network Interface(*)\Bytes Received/sec
I tried creating the performance counter:
protected PerformanceCounter FDiagNetSent = new PerformanceCounter("Network Interface", "Bytes Received/sec", "*");
But then I receive an exception saying that "*" isn't a valid instance name.
This also doesn't work:
protected PerformanceCounter FDiagNetSent = new PerformanceCounter("Network Interface(*)", "Bytes Received/sec");
Is using performace counters directly in Azure frowned upon?

Answer 1

The issue you're having here isn't related to Windows Azure, but to performance counters in general. As the name implies, Network Interface(*)\Bytes Received/sec is a performance counter for a specific network interface.
To initialize the performance counter, you'll need to initialize it with the name of the instance (the network interface) you'll want to get the metrics from:
var counter = new PerformanceCounter("Network Interface",
"Bytes Received/sec", "Intel[R] WiFi Link 1000 BGN");
As you can see from the code, I'm specifying the name of the network interface. In Windows Azure you don't control the server configuration (the hardware, the Hyper-V virtual network card, ...), so I wouldn't advise on using the name of the network interface.
That's why it might be safer to enumerate the instance names to initialize the counter(s):
var category = new PerformanceCounterCategory("Network Interface");
foreach (var instance in category.GetInstanceNames())
{
var counter = new PerformanceCounter("Network Interface",
"Bytes Received/sec", instance);
...
}