Sitecore Performance Counters Create Unnecessary Log Entries

Sitecore performance counters act as counters that aid in the logging process.  Example values are:

How many Items got accessed?
How many PhysicalReads/Writes happened?
How many CacheHits/Missed happened?

The list is very extensive but you kind of get the idea.  The App Pool user for the Sitecore instance must be given permissions to access these counters.  Although no application errors will be generated if you don't, you will just see unnecessary entries in the log files  like this:



Needless to say, this bulks up your log files needlessly and wastes previous hard drive space.  To assign permissions, follow these steps:

1) Run lusrmgr.msc
2) Open performance monitor users group
3) Add iis apppool\sitecore (or whatever the app pool name is) to the users of the group
4) Run iisreset

This should give the app pool user permission to access the performance counters and eliminate the log entries.