Performance Counters in Windows Azure Web Role

I tried adding some performance counters for Windows Azure Web Role in the OnStart method of the WebRole and interestingly it was not getting enabled. The code just executed fine with no results present in the “WADPerformanceCountersTable”.

There are a few things which need to be done correctly to ensure that this works

1) The WebRole code should be running in the elevated context. In order to make sure this happens you should add a tag in ServiceDefinition.csdef file under the WebRole which is trying to add the counter. See screenshot below

2) If you are trying to update an existing deployment the new performance counters may not be picked up. To ensure that they are delete the existing deployment and create a new one. It seems that that the performance counters are picked up based on an xml file under the “wad-control-container” blob. This xml file is made for each deployment and for some reason it was not getting updated for my case.

Hope this helps…

¬Abhishek