Abstract: A performance monitoring system uses a client/server architecture across a network including a plurality of interconnected computers. A data collector process collects and stores data from a monitored process, wherein the data collector process allows a user to control a frequency of collection for each of one or more different types of the collected data and gathers the different types of the collected data in parallel from the monitored process. A server process distributes the data collected by the data collector process to one or more client processes. Each client process manages a connection with the server process on behalf of one or more performance monitoring applications and relays data requests to the server process and delivers results therefrom to the performance monitoring applications.