Monitoring Custom Windows Services

A lot of my work at Esendex involves creating and maintaining Windows Services that form the guts of a much larger product that we collectively call the Esendex Messaging System. The work that these services do can differ wildly: everything from the relatively mundane to complex critical services that the business depends on.

Because of this, each service needs to be monitored in different ways. Sometimes its OK to trawl through log files to discover what the service is doing, but with other more widely used services this quickly becomes tedious.

We're currently in the process of rolling out an update to one of our critical Windows Services, and this update involves an architecture change that makes examining logs beyond tedious, it's actually unworkable for anything other than tracking historical events.

This is where we use custom performance counters. If you're a developer and don't know what these are, then read up on it, and quickly. Performance counters can be used to give you visibility on the near-realtime progress of your systems.

Here are some examples of what we monitor with performance counters:

• Execution time of certain key interface methods,
• Total counts of current throughput at various stages of a message's journey through the system,
  
• Rates of current throughput (how many messages per second, etc),
• Statuses of key services.
  

From these we can use the standard Windows Performance Monitor to watch what a service is doing. For a more bespoke monitoring solution you can also write your own applications that read your performance counters and display the results in a more friendly way.

If I get time I'll knock up some sample code demonstrating how to do this.