Perfmon - Boredo Intro

Perfmon Counters:

Perform is perhaps the most popular Performance monitoring tool provided by Microsoft, and by far my favourite tool. Briefly put, Perfmon allows us to save the useful performance monitoring counters which come in handy while doing performance analysis , identifying hardware bottlenecks etc. Performance monitoring counters are key performance indicators which help us understand the current health and state of our server with respect to CPU,memory,locks,queue length and many more..

Lemme provide a quick intro on how to use perfmon.

To view system's current health:

> Start ->Run -> Type perfmon
> Pretty good looking screen showing some graphs pops up
> On the graph, you can right click, pick Add Counters
> On the Add counter screen, pick a performance object. Performance Object drop
down shows the different categories of counters available for us.
> Pick a counter listed below.

To store the perfmon counter values on a file:

> On the left expand Performance logs and Alerts
> Click on counter logs
> Right click and pick new log settings.
> Pick the path you want to save the counter and pick the counters using Add
counter .
> Under log file type, pick the type of file in which you want to save. I prefer
CSV as its viewable in excel. Default is binary.
> Under schedule tab pick the schedule that suits your needs.

With a copy of saved performance log file, one can perform the analysis of performance data of monitored server, on any windows machine.

For viewing the saved log for later analysis:

> open Perfmon.
> Click on system monitor.
> Right click on the graph area. Click on properties.
> On Source tab, pick log files and select the path where the performance log file
is located.
> Add the counters as explained earlier.

No screenshots on this one as its a fairly simple tool providing awesome info, and there are billion pages online explaining perform. Then dont ask me why this post?. I did it for the heck of it.The next one will definitely be lot more meaningful as I plan to discuss my favourite ten perform counters.