Microsoft has provided monitoring tools ever since the NT days, and in fact some of those tools don’t look too different even in Server 2008 (wish I still had a screenshot of NT PerfMon, it looks almost the same in its new location under the Windows Reliability and Performance Monitor). And, now as then, it has been somewhat less than easy to get a grip on what all those objects, counters, and instances might actually mean.
The built-in data collector sets in Server 2008 can be helpful in this regard, and the little description box you can activate via checkbox when adding counters may also provide some useful information. But I recently ran across a tool that is really cool: Clint Huffman’s “Performance Analysis of Logs” tool, or PAL for short. (Get it at http://pal.codeplex.com.)
PAL is a VBS script with supporting GUI and “thresholds” files (these last contain information on when counter values might represent performance problems). It’s fairly easy to use: generate some logs using WRPM or Server Manager, then run PAL to digest them. The end result is an HTML report showing you where the red flags are. (Yes it’s even color-coded.) I can’t think of a better way to get quick, actionable intelligence from performance monitoring in Server 2008 than Clint Huffman’s PAL.
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