Most of the application metrics can be easily captured using the system-level performance counters or other functions provided by the operating system.

Also, the instrumentation of many Application Performance Management (APM) tools (such as Azure Application Insights) can be configured to collect data without having to manually change the code. Instead, checkpoints are inserted that can capture all the information generated when a transaction starts and completes, or is generated by additional services (such as databases, storage, authentication, and authorization, or third-party web APIs).

Not enough? Alternatively, you can use your APM tool in combination with an application-logging framework (such as ILogger) or an extension API.

However, note that in this approach, you must manually add probes to your code that provide the information in the format expected by the APM.