Monitoring .net application active sessions

[David.Morris]

I need to monitor the total number of active sessions on a tier w/ 4 nodes and can't find a configuration that will give me that value.

I'm using metric ASP.NET Applications|Sessions Active. If I set the Affected Entities to Tier, then the Critical Criteria tab requires selection of a qualifier, all of which break the value up resulting in the Health Rule recording and triggering off of the values for individual nodes - so, not the "tier" at all.

Setting Affected Entities, as expected, does the same thing - reporting on metrics at the node level.

What I find most puzzling is that I have a Dashboard widget, using the same Sessions Active metric w/ Qualifier type Current and the widget gives the aggregated total of the Tier - which is what I want in the Health Rule.

Why would the Dashboard provide a metric value but a Health Rules won't provide the same?

Thanks.