dotnet-profiling
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.
Out of scope: OpenTelemetry metrics collection and distributed tracing setup -- see [skill:dotnet-observability]. Microbenchmarking setup (BenchmarkDotNet) is owned by this epic's companion skill -- see [skill:dotnet-benchmarkdotnet]. Performance architecture patterns (Span<T>, ArrayPool, sealed devirtualization) are owned by this epic's companion skill -- see [skill:dotnet-performance-patterns]. Continuous benchmark regression detection in CI -- see [skill:dotnet-ci-benchmarking]. Architecture patterns (caching, resilience) -- see [skill:dotnet-architecture-patterns].
Cross-references: [skill:dotnet-observability] for GC/threadpool metrics interpretation and OpenTelemetry correlation, [skill:dotnet-benchmarkdotnet] for structured benchmarking after profiling identifies hot paths, [skill:dotnet-performance-patterns] for optimization patterns to apply based on profiling results.
dotnet-counters -- Real-Time Metric Monitoring
Overview
dotnet-counters provides real-time monitoring of .NET runtime metrics without modifying application code. Use it as a first-pass triage tool to identify whether a performance problem is CPU-bound, memory-bound, or I/O-bound before reaching for heavier instrumentation.
Monitoring Running Processes
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