The .NET platform makes it fairly easy to write and deploy Web Services quickly. Being able to support both web-based (ASP.NET app) consumers and Windows application-based consumers from the same Web Service is a welcome efficiency. Finding tools to monitor your custom Web Services can be problematic and time consuming, but happily WMI provides classes to monitor them. Including .NET application workload information on top of basic IIS Server monitoring is essential to achieving accurate performance and capacity planning analysis, which lie at the heart of service assurance and forecasting both requirements and capital budgets.

What types of data will we want?

So here is how you build a good picture of workload and performance on .NET platforms. We will want our analysis to include both trend analysis and workload characterization. Trend analysis is simply looking at how the peaks are growing and estimating when resources will be exhausted. Workload Characterization includes examining the contribution of component workload processes during peak periods. Peak periods are important because they clearly show the relationship between capacity required to assure service and current resource consumption. First, define what needs to be included in the data collection to support the desired analysis, but it generally includes: