When trying to diagnose the health or performance of an application, there's usually never enough information. It's always nice to provide more. Performance counters allow us to continuously log the current state of our software and, with the help of tools like Performance Monitor that are baked into Windows, provide a standard view of that data for system administrators.
In this recipe, we'll add a new performance counter for logging the number of sandwiches made for a school lunch program. We'll use Performance Monitor to see a live feed of this data as it occurs. We'll write a simple console application to publish the sandwich count.
To prepare for this recipe, we'll install a test console application along with our performance counter so that we can enter data and see it displayed in the Performance Monitor in real time. Follow these steps to include the test app in our installer:
Create a new setup project and call it
PerformanceCounterInstaller...