dotnet-profiling

Diagnostic tool guidance for investigating .NET performance problems. Covers real-time metric monitoring with dotnet-counters, event tracing and flame graph generation with dotnet-trace, and memory dump capture and analysis with dotnet-dump. Focuses on interpreting profiling data (reading flame graphs, analyzing heap dumps, correlating GC metrics) rather than just invoking tools.

Version assumptions: .NET SDK 8.0+ baseline. All three diagnostic tools (dotnet-counters, dotnet-trace, dotnet-dump) ship with the .NET SDK -- no separate installation required.

Scope

• Real-time metric monitoring with dotnet-counters
• Event tracing and flame graph generation with dotnet-trace
• Memory dump capture and analysis with dotnet-dump
• Interpreting profiling data (flame graphs, heap dumps, GC metrics)

Out of scope

• OpenTelemetry metrics and distributed tracing -- see [skill:dotnet-observability]
• Microbenchmarking setup (BenchmarkDotNet) -- see [skill:dotnet-benchmarkdotnet]
• Performance architecture patterns (Span, ArrayPool, sealed) -- see [skill:dotnet-performance-patterns]
• Continuous benchmark regression detection in CI -- see [skill:dotnet-ci-benchmarking]