John Luif

Today I ran into a security issue with performance counters.  Turns out to create a performance counter/category Administrative privileges are needed.  I fail to see the reasoning behind needing admin permissions for perf counter creation, they are important but not that important.  Seems like a user belonging to the Performance Monitor Users group should be enough.

Anyway, the work around.  It was first set up in the Global.asax Application Start to check and create if needed the category and performance counters.  As stated above this would only work if the Application Pool was running with admin permissions which is not a good idea.  So instead of using the Global.asax for perf counter creation I moved it to a custom action on an msi installer.  This seems to be a very common approach when dealing with perf counters which it is now obvious why.

Honestly after doing some work with perf counters this seems like an area of the framework that could use some attention.  I will soon see what Orcas has to offer.