Something I have been giving thought to is that the .NET Framework exposes perfmon counters for all manner of useful stats.
An unlikely tool? Not so
much... Of particular use is the feature where perfmon can track exceptions thrown throughout
all managed apps or, alternatively for any chosen running managed application. You
can then compare the number of Finally
blocks hit after an exception was reached (there is a counter
specifically for this!) vs. exceptions thrown. In normal
conditions I don't think I'd like these todiffer significantly.
Really this is using perfmon to track stats from .NET apps provided by the framework; but performance isn't far from the
surface. Throwing and Catching
exceptions is a very costly operation for the Framework and is a significant
performance hit to a running application.
Three things, and some links:
1. You don't have to be looking at your dev machine. If you have administrative access to a test
server you can remotely watch any perfmon counters. Useful if your application runs as a service or for ASP.NET applications.
Also, create a shortcut to
perfmon.exe in your System32 directory to get to quick access to the Run As...
command for those running their developer environment with least privilege (nod on this to Don Kiely, Michael Howard).
2. If you need to track these in a running app like a Windows
Service or a ASP.NET application consider using MRTG to graph
the results for you. I've
used this before as a make-shift NMS console monitoring server system health.
It's more secure than SNMP and very low on resource use.
The official MRTG site has the basics for setting up MRTG on Windows, but Castellan has a (slightly dated) but much more relevant guide.
3. Consider logman to configure the Performance Monitor service. Again this is worth a blog post by
itself. Open a command prompt and logman /? for more
Where to next? One day I'd like to automate perfmon logging as part of an NUnit test harness to give
another measure of quality parallel to Nunit.
I'll keep you posted.