CPU usage

Hi,

You can do this a number of ways.

You can choose the processor counter which will give you total CPU usage across the machine or alternaively you can use the process counter from which you can select individual processes (including the application you're interested) and select specific information on that process - that includes CPU time.

I'd tend to go for the process counter as it will give you all sorts of information on the application you want to measure - not just CPU usage.
...but if it was me, I'd be adding a whole bunch of counters as you can never have too much information when you're analysing how the system is performing.

If the application uses SQLServer on the same machine, then add some SQL counters. If you suspect that network usage may be an issue then add the network counters.

More importantly add counters associated with memory and pagefile usage. Also disk usage...

Its best to analyse an application's performance in the context of the wholemachine's performance and so you need to add counters to show what the machine was doing at a particular point during the running of the application.

Finally... When I've done performance measurements in the past, I've selected ALL the counters that *may* be relevent and gone from there.

And before you start measuring, you should do baseline monitoring - monitor the machine without the application running to get a steady state of the machine to compare to.

Hope this helps,
Cheers,
Tim.