Tackling server performance issues can be a major challenge. Bottlenecks, changing workloads, and disk or network saturation are just a few of the potential performance concerns that can arise. Furthermore, today's client-server applications, multi-node clusters, and distributed infrastructures only magnify the complexity of troubleshooting these issues.
Fortunately, there are several tools built right into the Windows operating system that can assist you. For a quick and dirty analysis of potential bottlenecks, you have the Windows Task Manager. The Task Manager, only allows you to monitor the performance interactively, however, without the ability to log any data. This can be lacking if the performance issue is a transient one that could surface when you aren't watching.
Better yet, there is the Performance Monitor utility, or Perfmon. Perfmon allows you to collect performance metrics to a log file which can be subsequently analyzed in detail. You can graph various performance counters illustrating their minimum, maximum and average values across a time range. There is also a handy Microsoft utility called PerfWiz that provides a menu-driven interface to automate the collection of Perfmon data.
The downside to Perfmon is that it provides no assistance when trying to correlate the hundreds of performance counters that exist. It can take hours or days to analyze a set of Perfmon logs to determine which counters are out of tolerance and which ones are interrelated. There are also many tricks to learn about utilizing Perfmon, such as scaling values, adjusting time ranges and analyzing graphs.
PAL to the rescue
Fortunately, there is a free tool developed jointly by Microsoft and the open source community called PAL ...
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