AJAX-enabled Performance Counter Web Control
Introduction:
What impresses potential clients touring your office more than anything? A big screen displaying realtime performance data for your critical servers. I'm joking, but only partially: it makes a company look professional and it's also a huge boon for network operations employees who can tell within seconds if something is wrong with a server. An ideal presentation medium for this is obviously a web page, since you can implement multiple versions of this performance data display for network operations or even for people wishing to check on the status of a server over their phone or PDA and also drive automatic updating of that data. There are several rudimentary web controls and tutorials out there on this subject (such as this article at 4GuysFromRolla), but nothing that was very feature rich or that automatically updated, which I considered to be the most compelling feature of performance counter data display. This kind of surprised me, so I decided to roll my own and develop the ASP.NET web control that you see here today.