Custom Counter Sets in Visual Studio for Software Testers
Visual Studio 2005 for Software Testers (VSST) allows you to create custom Counter Sets, which are a set of performance counters that can be applied to a computer in the test farm. VSST comes with some Counter Sets out-of-the-box (OOTB) for the Load Test, Controller and Agent amongst others:
Invariably when creating performance tests, you’ll develop them on a computer, which is not in the SharePoint Server Farm. This computer will most probably not have a number of the performance counters that you want to monitor. For instance SharePoint uses the w3wp (IIS) worker process, which unless you have IIS installed on your local machine, you will not be able to add the counters. To add the counters you need to specify a computer that has the counters that you require.
Typically I create a counter set for each of the server roles in the farm. This allows me to monitor different counters for different roles. For instance the Web Front End (WFE) servers counters are very different to the Back End SQL server. Joel Oleson has publish a good list of counters that the SharePoint Performance Team use.
Creating Custom Counter Set
1. Open or create a new Load Test in VSST;
2. Right mouse click on the Counter Set node and select Add Custom Counter Set;
3. In the properties pane give the newly created Counter Set a useful name e.g. SharePoint WFE, SharePoint DB, SharePoint Search e.t.c
4. Right mouse click the newly created Counter Set and select Add Counters;
5. Enter the name of the computer that you are going to collect the counters from e.g. SharePoint WFE or SQL Database server. The List of Performance Categories will be refreshed for the categories available on that server. If you select Process for instance, the list of instances will be different for the WFE and the DB servers. Select the required counters.
Note:
If you work in an environment where least privileges are employed you may not have sufficient right to add performance counters from a remote computer. You may encounter a message such as “Cant read performance counter categories for computer xxx”.
To be able to access the performance counters you need your system administrators to add you (or the account you are running the test under) to the following server roles:
- Performance Log Users – Members of this group have remote access to schedule logging of performance counters on this computer
- Performance Monitor Users – Members of this group have remote access to monitor this computer
Using Custom Counter Set
1. Open the Load Test where you created your custom counter set;
2. Right mouse click on Counter Set Mappings and Select Manage Counter Sets…;
3. In the Manage Counter Sets dialog box select Add Computer. Select the newly created Custom Counter Set and click OK;
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