Azure Application Insights–Collect Performance Counters data - Part II

About 2 years ago I blogged about the possibility to collect performance counter data as part of your Application Insights telemetry. If you missed the original post, first have a quick read here and then come back.

Back?

As mentioned in the original post, to be able to collect this performance data, the Application Pool user needs to be added to both the Performance Monitor Users and Performance Log Users group. Although I updated our internal wiki to emphasize this, I still noticed that most developers forget to do this with no collected data as a result. (Who reads documentation anyway?)

So let’s do what any developers does in this case, let’s automate the problem away…

I created a small tool that can be executed on the IIS web server. It goes through all the application pools, extracts the corresponding user and add it to the 2 groups as mentioned above.

I think the code is quite self-explanatory. Here is the part where I read out the application pools:

	using (ServerManager serverManager = new ServerManager())
	{
	foreach (ApplicationPool appPool in serverManager.ApplicationPools)
	{
	//User is constructed as a combination of 'IIS AppPool\' and the app pool name
	string appPoolUser = @"IIS AppPool\" + appPool.Name;
	if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(appPoolUser))
	{
	//English group names
	AddUserToGroup(appPoolUser, "Performance Log Users");
	AddUserToGroup(appPoolUser, "Performance Monitor Users");
	//Add other languages as needed
	}
	}
	}

view raw ReadAppPools.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

And here I add the application pool user to the correct groups:

	static void AddUserToGroup(string username, string groupName)
	{
	using (PrincipalContext pc = new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Machine))
	{
	GroupPrincipal group = GroupPrincipal.FindByIdentity(pc, groupName);
	if (group == null)
	{
	Console.WriteLine($"{groupName} group not found.");
	return;
	}
	NTAccount user = new NTAccount(username);
	var sid = ((SecurityIdentifier)user.Translate(typeof(SecurityIdentifier))).ToString();
	if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(sid) && !group.Members.Contains(pc, IdentityType.Sid, sid))
	{
	group.Members.Add(pc, IdentityType.Sid, sid);
	group.Save();
	Console.WriteLine($"Added {username} to {groupName} group.");
	}
	else
	{
	Console.WriteLine($"User {username} not found or already a member of Performance Log Users group.");
	}
	}
	}

view raw AddUserToGroup.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Feel free to use it for your own purposes.

Remark: If your server is using other localization settings, you have to update the tool as the group names will be different. I’ve added a (commented out) example in Dutch as part of the code.

More information

wullemsb/AppInsightsPoolTool: Allows to automatically add AppPool users to the correct groups for Application Insights (github.com)