Configure Performance Monitoring

AD FS includes its own dedicated performance counters to help you monitor the performance of both federation servers and federation server proxy computers. To use Performance Monitor to monitor the performance of your AD FS servers, it's useful to create a new data collector set and add the AD FS counters to that view. The following procedure describes how to configure performance monitoring for AD FS.

To configure performance monitoring for AD FS using Performance Monitor

  1. On the Start screen, type Performance Monitor, and then press ENTER.

  2. In the console tree, expand Data Collector Sets, right-click User Defined, point to New, and then click Data Collector Set.

    The Create New Data Collector Set Wizard appears.

  3. In Create New Data Collector Set, for Name type a name for the new data collector set (such as "AD FS performance"), click Create manually (Advanced), and then click Next.

  4. For the type of data to include, verify that Create data logs is selected, and then click the check boxes for the following data types: Performance counter, Event trace data, System configuration information.

  5. For performance counters, expand AD FS in the Available counters list, and then click Add.

    The AD FS performance counters should appear in the Added counters list.

  6. When you are prompted to add event trace providers, click Add, select AD FS Eventing and AD FS Tracing from the list of providers.

  7. When you are prompted to add registry keys to monitor, click Next.

  8. When you are prompted to specify the location to save the performance data, you can accept the default location (%systemdrive%\PerfLogs\Admin\<data_collector_set>, and then click Next.

  9. When you are prompted to create the data collector set, select Save and close, and then click Finish.

    The new data collector set appears in the console tree under the User Defined node.

  10. Use the following steps to work with the AD FS performance counters:

    • To begin performance monitoring using AD FS-related counters, right-click the data collector set that you added (such as "AD FS performance"), and then click Start.

    • To create a report to view the performance monitoring results, right-click the data collector set that you added (such as "AD FS performance"), and then click Latest Report.

    • To end a capture of performance data so that you can view the latest report, right-click the data collector set that you added (such as "AD FS performance"), and then click Stop.

    The latest report is added and numbered automatically (starting at 000001) under the Report\User Defined\<data_collector_set> node in the console tree.

AD FS performance counters

The following table lists the AD FS performance counters and describes how they are useful for monitoring activity that relates to either a federation server or federation server proxy.

Counter Description Can be used on:
Token Requests Monitors the number of token requests sent to the federation server including SSOAuth token requests. Federation Servers
Token Requests/sec Monitors the number of token requests sent to the federation server including SSOAuth token requests per second. Federation Servers
Federation Metadata Requests Monitors the number of incoming federation metadata requests sent to the federation server. Federation Servers
Federation Metadata Requests/sec Monitors the number of incoming federation metadata requests per second that are sent to the federation server. Federation Servers
Artifact Resolution Requests Monitors the number of incoming federation metadata requests per second that are sent to the federation server. Federation Servers
Artifact Resolution Requests/sec Monitors the number of requests to the artifact resolution endpoint per second that are sent to the federation server. Federation Servers
Proxy Requests Monitors the number of incoming requests sent to the federation server proxy. Federation Server Proxies
Proxy Requests/sec Monitors the number of incoming requests per second that are sent to the federation server proxy. Federation Server Proxies
Proxy MEX Requests Monitors the number of incoming WS-Metadata Exchange (MEX) requests that are sent to the federation server proxy. Federation Server Proxies
Proxy MEX Requests/sec Monitors the number of incoming MEX requests per second that are sent to the federation server proxy. Federation Server Proxies