Possible to view azure performance diagnostics via Perfmon

Question

I've setup a 150plus performance counters via diagnostics.wascfg file. The counters are appearing in wadperformance table.

When I logged on to azure VM and used Permon tool I could not see any of these counters setup. Please help me understand, how does it work?

Answer 1

One way to view this data is through 3rd party tools like Cerebrata's Azure Management Studio or Azure Diagnostics Manager (http://www.cerebrata.com). These tools essentially fetches the data from WADPerformanceCountersTable table and displays them in a Perfmon like UI.

If you want to view the data locally on your computer through Perfmon, do take a look at this blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/developertofu/archive/2010/08/17/announcing-the-perfmon-friendly-azure-log-viewer-plug-in.aspx which talks about an extension to Microsoft's Windows Azure MMC (not sure if this tool is still supported). This tool again fetches the data from diagnostics table, converts them into a format Perfmon understands.

UPDATE

When I logged on to azure VM and used Permon tool I could not see any of these counters setup. Please help me understand, how does it work?

Coming to your question, if I understand correctly your expectation is that when you launch perfmon you should see the counters which you have set already in the list. I don't think it's possible. When you configure Windows Azure Diagnostics (WAD) for capturing performance counters, basically you're telling WAD process to read values for the specified performance counters every "x" seconds/minutes and transfer this data into Windows Azure Storage every "y" minutes/hours. Perfmon is a client utility which has no idea about WAD. One possibility (though I have not tried it) is to launch Perfmon and configure the counters it needs to capture when your VM starts. That way when you RDP into your VM, you'll see Perfmon running and collecting the data for you.