Chapter 7 -- Performance Monitoring

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Chapter 7

Administrators, end users, and developers know that monitoring the health of the computer system is vitally important. Microsoft, well aware of this fact, built performance monitoring into Windows 2000. Unfortunately, very few applications take advantage of performance monitoring. Here are some of the reasons why:

• Microsoft has not made it easy to expose performance information.
• Developers must take the time to expose performance information in their applications.
• Microsoft has not emphasized or promoted the importance of performance monitoring.

I first looked into adding performance information to my own applications several years ago; flabbergasted by the complexity of the task, I postponed the job as long as I could. My eventual solution was to create a C++ class that encapsulates the process of exposing performance data to the operating system, allowing me to add performance data easily to any application. This C++ class appears at the end of the chapter.