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.NET metrics

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Metrics are numerical measurements reported over time, most often used to monitor the health of an application and generate alerts. For example, a web service might track how many requests it receives each second, how many milliseconds it took to respond, and how many of the responses sent an error back to the user. These metrics can be reported to a monitoring system at regular intervals. If the example web service is intended to respond to requests within 400 ms and then one day the response time slows to 600 ms, the monitoring system can notify engineers that the application is not operating as expected.

Getting started

There are two parts to using metrics in a .NET app:

  • Instrumentation: Code in .NET libraries takes measurements and associates these measurements with a metric name.
  • Collection: A .NET app developer configures which named metrics need to be transmitted from the app for external storage and analysis. Some tools may also let engineers configure this outside the app using config files or separate UI.

.NET library developers are primarily interested in the instrumentation step. App developers or operational engineers usually focus on the collection step, leveraging the pre-existing instrumentation within libraries they are using. However, if you're an app developer and none of the existing metrics meet your needs, you can also create new metrics.

Next steps