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Using Event Counters with Application Insights

When adding the Application Insights SDK to your application, a set of Performance Counters is tracked by default.

This is the list of default counters for ASP.NET web applications:

  • % Process\Processor Time
  • % Process\Processor Time Normalized
  • Memory\Available Bytes
  • ASP.NET Requests/Sec
  • .NET CLR Exceptions Thrown / sec
  • ASP.NET ApplicationsRequest Execution Time
  • Process\Private Bytes
  • Process\IO Data Bytes/sec
  • ASP.NET Applications\Requests In Application Queue
  • Processor(_Total)\% Processor Time

However Performance Counters are a windows only feature. With .NET being cross-platform, is there a solution that works on both Windows and Linux?

Of course there is! (Otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this blog post).

Collecting EventCounters with Application Insights

The documentation has the following to say about EventCounters:

EventCounter is .NET/.NET Core mechanism to publish and consume counters or statistics. EventCounters are supported in all OS platforms - Windows, Linux, and macOS. It can be thought of as a cross-platform equivalent for the PerformanceCounters that is only supported in Windows systems.

By default no EventCounters are collected, but they are easy to add by configuring the EventCounterCollectionModule:

Probably the hardest thing when implementing EventCounters is finding the list of built-in counters.

Here is an example where I added some extra EventCounters from ASP.NET Core:

Viewing EventCounters data in Application Insights

To view the tracked EventCounters, you need to look at the ‘Custom’ category inside the Log-based metrics namespace:

 

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