System Resources

The first aspect to measuring Microsoft .NET Performance is the system level. The System Resources reports provide information on the following key pressure points of .NET system performance:

• CPU
• Memory
• Physical Disk
• Network Interface

Processor

Using algorithms built in to RG Solutions, Daily Peaks in Online Processor Utilisation can easily be measured across a large number of systems and any growth trends can be monitored.

The chart illustrates how daily peaks in Online Processor utilisation can be reported for a single system directly from RG Solutions.

More detailed processor utilisation charts can be produced for servers which may have been highlighted in the Daily Peak reports. In such cases, the following chart illustrates how RG Solutions could be used to provide a report which profiles CPU usage by hour. This allows system administrators to visually scan CPU usage and to determine if usage is high all day long or if usage was high for just a few short periods.

Occasionally, further analysis may be necessary and this is easily accomplished using the RG Solutions Browse capability. In Browse mode, detailed data which identifies which process(s) were responsible for consuming the CPU can be identified.

This screen shot is an example of the detailed view. The display shows all of the processes running at 07:00 and to aid searching, the data has been sorted by CPU time used. A process called SQLSERV used 5,563 seconds of CPU time.

If necessary, this information could be easily extracted from RG Solutions in a variety of formats.

Memory

When measuring Memory it is necessary to look at multiple Windows Objects to get a complete picture of what is happening with Memory.

As such, the memory report uses Memory, Physical Disk and Server Objects and rather than presenting information in a chart, a List report format is used.

In reports such as this the power and flexibility of RG Solutions is demonstrated because of the ability to assemble data from a variety of Windows Objects and present them in an easily repeatable report format.

Physical Disk

The Physical Disk report is based solely on the Physical Disk Windows Object and provides metrics for the assessment of Physical Disk performance.

This example report shows selected metrics for measuring Physical Disk performance.

Network Interface

The final aspect of System Resources is to report on Network Interface activity.

This report is another example of how RG Solutions can be used to combine data from multiple data sources to create a single report. In this case, Network Interface, Server and Processor.

Again, the RG Solutions Browse capability could be used to investigate any issues highlighted in this report.

.NET CLR and Managed Code

The first of the .NET reports provides information on the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and Managed Code.

The CLR is the foundation of the .NET framework. With CLR being responsible for managing code at execution time, core services such as memory and thread management, security and remoting, this vital report provides data gathered from multiple Windows Objects to measure performance of this area.

This is an extremely powerful report that combines different Windows Objects into a single report. This report can be used to determine if time in Garbage collect is growing or is too high, the amount of memory used by processes that cannot be shared, the amount of memory used by Managed and Unmanaged Resources, by Large Objects, the number of threads, exceptions, locks and the relative cost of code access security checks.

.NET Remoting

The .NET remoting report provides information on throughput and contention.

.NET Interop

The RG Solutions .NET Interop report provides a measure of interoperability performance by reporting on key metrics related to processor, memory and marshalling (chattiness of marshalled interfaces).

This report also selects data from multiple Windows Objects. Some of the data has already been explained in a previous report but the rest of the data is new. Firstly, processor is broken down into User, Privileged and Interrupt time. System information shows the processor queue length along with the level of context switching. Finally, the amount of Marshalling activity is reported so that chattiness of code switches from managed to unmanaged and back again can be assessed.

ADO.NET Data Access

In order to measure ADO.NET performance, this report includes metrics for Connection Pooling, Access Methods, Cache, Transactions and Locks, SQL, .NET and system performance Objects are combined into this single report.

Drawing upon yet more data, this report includes .NET, Microsoft SQL and Standard Windows Objects. Use this report to determine if connection pooling is working effectively, the type and level of various SQL search methods, if Cache is being used effectively, SQL database transaction throughput and the effect of SQL Locks and Latches upon performance.

Want to Know More?

These reports are just a sample of the reports that could be produced to measure Microsoft .NET Performance. To download a whitepaper please register your interest via the Support Pages - http://www.cpiuk.com/support.php.