title: How to program hardware performance counters
body: <p>I've been dealing with this problem for my thesis.
  The goal is to develop a .net server monitoring tool specifically for windows 2K8 servers.
  So far, all I can access are software performance counters. Meaning those that are available through perfmon and the WMI classes.</p>
  
  <p>But then there's also the issue that I need to be able to monitor things like the number of TLB-misses that occur, or the current memory bandwidth. And that's where I'm stuck...
  As there is no standard .net way to get these counters I've been reading through some code from open source programs such as Oprofile. But since I don't know what exactly I'm looking for, not much progress has been made on that front.</p>
  
  <p>So I humbly ask if there is somebody here, who has any experience with this kind of thing and could help me out a bit.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance.</p>