All 16 Diagnostics & Performance questions
More in Diagnostics & Performance
What tools does .NET provide for basic application diagnostics, and what is dotnet-trace used for? What is the Diagnostics IPC channel, and how do diagnostic tools like dotnet-trace connect to a running .NET process without a debugger? What is Application Insights (or OpenTelemetry) integration, and what value does it add over basic logging? What is BenchmarkDotNet, and why is it preferred over manual Stopwatch-based timing for measuring code performance? What is the purpose of the dotnet-monitor tool, and how does it enable diagnostics in containerized/production environments? What is a memory dump, and how do you capture and analyze one for a .NET application experiencing high memory usage or a crash? What is the purpose of health check response caching and how does frequent health check polling itself impact application performance? What is the Large Object Heap (LOH), and why do objects larger than 85,000 bytes behave differently in the garbage collector? How does the dotnet-gcdump tool help diagnose managed memory leaks, and how do you analyze the resulting heap snapshot? How do EventCounters and the newer System.Diagnostics.Metrics API (Meter) let you expose custom application-specific performance metrics?
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.NET › Diagnostics & Performance

How does dotnet-counters provide live performance monitoring, and what key metrics does it expose by default?

Intermediate

Answer

dotnet-counters connects to a running .NET process and streams live performance counters to the console (or exports them), including built-in metrics like CPU usage, GC heap size and collection counts per generation, ThreadPool thread count and queue length, exception count, and (for ASP.NET Core apps) request rate and active request count -- giving a real-time operational view without needing a full profiling session.
dotnet-counters monitor --process-id 1234

# Live output includes:
# cpu-usage, gc-heap-size, gen-0-gc-count, threadpool-thread-count, request-rate...
Real-world example An engineer investigating intermittent slow responses runs dotnet-counters live during a suspected incident window, immediately spotting an unusual spike in ThreadPool queue length correlating with the reported slowness.

Common follow-ups: How do you add custom application-specific counters using EventCounter or Meter?;How does this compare to a full APM solution like Application Insights?

Logging;CLR & Runtime
All 16 Diagnostics & Performance questions