Best PerfCounters for monitoring system health of IIS, WCF, WWF and .Net for a Workflow based solution

Question

We have a solution built in .Net that will be installed into a client environment.

The solution will span multiple servers and be running on multiple tiers. The client makes us of MOM (Microsoft operations Manager) to monitor the system.

What are the best counters to use for monitoring the overall health of the system? Are there any built in counters that we could add into a MOM Pack (as an Alert) to test a given scenario?

Any thoughts suggestions would be much apreciated.

Thanks

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I have found the following info on WCF, but I am still looking for similar information in terms of Workflow, IIS and .Net:

WCF

How to use performance counters to diagnose performance of WCF applications
[http://blogs.msdn.com/wenlong/archive/2007/09/07/how-to-use-performance-counters-to-diagnose-performance-of-wcf-applications.aspx]

This article discusses the WCF perf counters. The counters are not enabled by default. Enabling the method level counters may however have a performance overhead due to the sheer numbers.

We have already discussed these before, and we should be able to test and validate them as soon as we get a new stable build into the perf test environment.

See Also:
WCF Performance Counters
[http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms735098.aspx]

Answer 1

For WWF, you can add some performance counts by your requirement for health monitoring. It depends on how your program handle the exceptions of workflow. This list describes the performance counters of WWF:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms732345%28v=VS.90%29.aspx. If your solution use abort method to handle the workflow failure, then I would like to suggest the 'Workflows Aborted' and 'Workflows Aborted/sec' counts.

For IIS, I personally think your wcf health monitoring should cover the health status of IIS unless your WCF is self-hosted. In that case, here is the list of Microsoft suggested IIS performance counters(http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/7898b860-462c-4846-a3a8-1179f287ad88.mspx?mfr=true).