Preferred ways to collect performance counters data for ASP.NET applications

Question

Assume that I have an ASP.NET application running on Windows Server 2008 R2 + IIS 7.5 (or Windows Server 2012 + IIS 8) which works with SQL Server as its data store.

There are previously asked questions on which ASP.NET performance counters to monitor but I couldn't find any good resource for a way of automated collection of performance counters data.

The idea I have in my mind is as follows:

Collect the specified performance counters within a specific interval (10 seconds, maybe?) and put them to a storage system (A SQL Server database, Windows Azure Table Storage, Windows Azure Blob Storage, MongoDB, etc.).

The followings are the ways that I consider:

• A PowerShell script to achieve the above action. I haven't done that before but I assume there is a way to associate this script with the windows scheduler to automatically invoke within a specific interval.
• A Windows Service to achieve the above action.

The big picture is that I will have a dashboard application which will read those data to display graphical output (charts, etc.).

What are your thoughts and previous experiences?

Answer 1

Based on my previous experiences windows services is my last resort. Actually achieving this kind of tasks with powershell is more maintainable and easy for me. Now i am trying to integrate RavenDB for counters and eventlog for having a detailed report about IIS applications.