This topic provides an overview of default Kentico CMS performance counters, their definition XML file and categories where the counters are stored.

 

Application name web.config key

 

Before getting to the counters, it is important to explain the following key in the appSettings section of the instance's web.config file:

 

 

This key is added to the web.config file automatically during installation. In case of IIS installation, path to the instance in IIS is used as its value. In case of Visual Studio web server installation, name of the target web project root folder is used. The value must be less than 60 characters long. In general, the value of the key is used by Kentico CMS Windows services to identify the Kentico CMS instance. Specifically for Health monitoring, the value is used to identify performance counters to which monitored values about the instance should be written.

 

 

Performance counter categories

 

Kentico CMS performance counters are stored in two categories:

 

•Kentico - General (<CMSApplicationName>) - contains general counters monitoring the Kentico CMS instance as a whole. It contains single‑instance counters, which means each of the counters can be added to the to the list of monitored counters just once. If a counter is present in this category as well as in the Sites category, its value in this category is a sum of values of all site instances of the counter in the Sites category.

•Kentico - Sites (<CMSApplicationName>) - contains site specific counters monitoring particular websites running in the Kentico CMS instance. It contains multi‑instance counters, i.e. each of the counters can be added to the list of monitored counters multiple times — once for each website running in the instance. These counters are used only if the Enable site counters option is enabled in Site Manager -> Settings -> System -> Health monitoring.

 

The <CMSApplicationName> part of the category names is the value of the CMSApplicationName web.config key explained above. In case of IIS installation, the value is reversed in the category names so that website name is stated first and the IIS path after it. For example, if the IIS path is Default Web Site/CMS, you would have CMS/Default Web Site in the name of the category. This should provide better orientation in the category list in Performance Monitor.

 

Performance counters definition XML

 

In ~\AppData\CMSModules\HealthMonitoring, you can find the counters.xpc file. This is a file in XML format which contains definitions of default performance counters for the respective instance of Kentico CMS. It contains definitions of both General and Site counters. When performance counters are registered in Windows, this file is accessed to get the list of counters to be registered.

 

Apart from this default file, the whole folder structure under ~\AppData\CMSModules\ is also searched for other files with the .xpc extension when counters are registered. The other files can contain definitions of additional performance counters and when found, the counters are registered as well.

 

The following code is an extract from the counters.xpc file:

 

 

As you can see in the code extract above, each counter element has the following attributes:

 

•Key – counter key used for its identification.

•Name – name of the counter displayed in Performance Monitor or another monitoring tool.

•Type – type of the counter, all types are listed and explained at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.diagnostics.performancecountertype.aspx.

•Enabled – indicates if the counter should be enabled.

•OnlyGlobal – indicates if the counter will be included in the General category (true) or in both General and Sites categories (false).

 

Default performance counters

 

The following table lists the default counters that are pre-defined in the counters.xpc file and registered in Windows by default:

 

 

It is also possible to define custom counters to monitor other system values according to your specific needs. For more information on this, please refer to the Adding custom counters topic.

 

Clearing counter values

 

By clicking the Clear counters button in Site Manager -> Administration -> System, it is possible to clear values stored in all counters registered for the current Kentico CMS instance. Due to the fact that Health monitoring is only functional in Full Trust environment, the button is only present in this section if the application is running in Full Trust environment.