Upating Performance Counters from ASP.NET
Posted: Friday, December 05, 2003 10:58 AM
by
bruce
Filed under: SOAP, Tips
While there are a number of quite useful articles about how to access and increment PerformanceCounters through the .NET Framework (the PerformanceCounter class description on MSDN and Creating Custom Performance Counters, also on MSDN to name two), the actual deployment of a web service (or any ASP.NET application, as it turns out) is not so thoroughly covered.
The biggest problem surrounding the move into production of an ASP.NET application that updates performance counters is permissions. By default, in order to increment a performance counter, the user needs to have Administrator or Power User rights. You could change the processModel value in machine.config to System, but that leaves a security hole wide enough to drive an 18-wheeler through. Which is another way of saying “Don't do this!!!!!”.
For completeness, the event log entry that appear as a result of the lack of permissions is as follows:
Event ID: 1000
Source: Perflib
Access to performance data was denied to ASPNET as attempted from C:\WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\aspnet_wp.exe
Also, on the actual call to increment the PerformanceCounter, the following exception is thrown:
System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: Access is denied
with the stack trace pointing to the GetData method in the PerformanceMonitor class.
As it turns out, the permission set that is required is much smaller than running as “System”. In the registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Perflib, set the Access Control List so that the ASPNET user has Full Control. Voila, the problem goes away.
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