Performance Counter Logs on IIS 6 Web Servers

I would seperate out the charting/display from the montioring/alerting piece. You haven't said how many object you have. For most shops I'd write a powershell script to get the counters I want and pipe the output to powergadgets and for small shops use polymon to monitor the windows stuff and groundwork to monitor the rest. In a larger environment (30+ servers) I'd take a look at System Center Operations Manager for monitoring and alerting. You have to realize howver that SCOM is NOT just monitoring. It's designed to correct problems and ensure business service, unlike most monitoring software that only cares about server counters. Other options would be tivoli or openview.

You can't observe what's happening without influencing the object being observed to some degree :-)

But the effect is minimal. Otherwise you'd have had a lot of people complaining about how useless performance monitor is when practically used in the field.

Edit: The more counters you use, the more overhead it does impose (as from this link). My experiences are that the overhead is usually negligible...if perfmon in normal use can kill your system, you're running on the edge of issues anyway.