Creating a new performance counter on Windows with C# .NET

In this post we saw how to list all performance counter categories and the performance counters within each category available on Windows. The last time I checked there were a little more than 27500 counters and 148 categories available on my local PC. That’s quite a lot and will probably cover most diagnostic needs where performance counters are involved in a bottleneck investigation.

However, at times you might want to create your own performance counter. The System.Diagnostics library provides the necessary objects. Here’s how you can create a new performance counter category and a counter within that category:

string categoryName = "Football";
			
if (!PerformanceCounterCategory.Exists(categoryName))
{
	string firstCounterName = "Goals scored";
	string firstCounterHelp = "Goals scored live update";
	string categoryHelp = "Football related real time statistics";
				
	PerformanceCounterCategory customCategory = new PerformanceCounterCategory(categoryName);
	PerformanceCounterCategory.Create(categoryName, categoryHelp, PerformanceCounterCategoryType.SingleInstance, firstCounterName, firstCounterHelp);
}

You’ll need to run Visual Studio as an administrator to create the category and counter.

Don’t forget to check if the category exists otherwise you’ll get an exception. The new category and counter turns up in the Performance Monitor window:

A slightly different way of creating a new counter is through the CounterCreationData object:

PerformanceCounterCategory customCategory = new PerformanceCounterCategory(categoryName);
CounterCreationData counterCreationData = new CounterCreationData(firstCounterName, firstCounterHelp, PerformanceCounterType.NumberOfItems32);
CounterCreationDataCollection collection = new CounterCreationDataCollection();
collection.Add(counterCreationData);
PerformanceCounterCategory.Create(categoryName, categoryHelp, collection);

If you add that counter to the Performance Monitor then there will be no data yet of course.

At first the counter will be set as read-only but it can be changed easily. The PerformanceCounter object has the Increment() and IncrementBy() methods. Increment() adds 1 to the counter value and IncrementBy() increments the value by the specified amount. You can pass a negative value to decrement the current counter value.

Let’s see these methods in action:

string categoryName = "Football";
string counterName = "Goals scored";
PerformanceCounter footballScoreCounter = new PerformanceCounter(categoryName, counterName);
footballScoreCounter.ReadOnly = false;
while (true)
{
	footballScoreCounter.Increment();
	Thread.Sleep(1000);
	Random random = new Random();
	int goals = random.Next(-5, 6);
	footballScoreCounter.IncrementBy(goals);
	Thread.Sleep(1000);
}

Performance Monitor starts putting the values in the graph:

You can view all posts related to Diagnostics here.