Question

I am building a client-server based solution; client being a desktop application and the server being a web application.

Basically, I need to monitor the performance and resource utilization of the client, which is a .NET 2.0 based Windows Desktop application.

The most important thing I need to monitor is the network resources the client uses, i.e. what is the size of the data that flows out from the client to the server and what is the size of the data that the client downloads from the server.

Apart from this, general performance monitoring would help too.

Please guide.

Edit: A few people have suggested using perfmon, but aren’t the values shown in perfmon system-wide? I need these network based stats for a single application only…bytes being sent and received by a single desktop application.

Answer 1

You need to split your monitoring in two parts:

• How the system interacts with the server (number of calls performed)
• Amount of network traffic (size of exchanged data for any call)

The first part is (in my experience) often negleted while it has a lot of importance, because acquiring a new connection is often much more expensive that data traffic in itself.

You do not tell us anything about the king of connection you’re using (low level tcpip calls, web services, WCF or what else) but my suggestion is:

• Find a way to determine how many time your application calls the server
• Find how much any single call is costing in term of data exchanged

How to monitor these values depends a lot from the technology involved, for some is very simple (if, for example, you’re using a web service, setting up Fiddler to monitor the calls and examining an monitoring results is very simple), for other you need to work using a low level traffic analyzer like Wireshark or MS Network Monitor and learn how to filter traffic according to IP address of the server, ports used and other parameters.

If you clarify your application architecture I can try to be more specific.

Regards
Massimo