CIB Engineering

I'm sure that you are like many of us here in technology who have had somebody on your team who is a "perfmon" expert or something like that. Or perhaps you currently have some gimped up performance monitoring solution where you are capturing data every 5 minutes across your trade floor. Anyway, the above two never seem to work out. The perfmon expert seems to think gathering metrics every 5 minutes will yield any reasonable issue - and as a result, you spend even more time and effort disputing this persons findings. windows 7 has some ramped up features for monitoring you may find useful, but I still believe its not an enterprise worthy solution. Nor do i think any of the third party apps are either. lets take a second and look at some of the new features.

1. fire up the performance monitor through your control panel (control panel > performance information and tools > advanced tools > performance monitor, or if you like the command line > key in perfmon and hit enter.
2. the look and feel is similar to the old school performance monitor we are all used to.
3. 
4. to add additional counters, click on the green + button on the toolbar. note, you still have the option of selecting a single instance of a counter or all instances. Example: if you have a multi-core processor, you have the opportunity to select one core ore all of them.
5. each counter will appear as a different color on your graph, do highlight a specific counter click on the counter and then select ctrl + H and your counter will change color.
6. to change your graph refresh rate, right click on performance monitor and select properties. you will then be prompted with a dialog box with 5 different tabs.
   1. general: In the Graph Elements group, you can adjust the Sample Every box to change how frequently the graph updates. You can also specify whether the Legend, Value Bar, and Toolbar are displayed and whether the Report and Histogram views  show Default, Maximum, Minimum, Average, or Current values.
   2. source: On this tab, you can choose whether to display current activity in real time or show log ? les that you have saved using a DCS (for more information, see the DCS section below)
   3. data: On this tab, in the Counters list, select the counter that you want to configure and adjust Color, Width, and Style
   4. graph: By default, Performance Monitor begins overwriting graphed counter values on the left portion of the chart after the specified duration is reached. If you want to record counter values over a long period of time, you likely want to see the chart scroll from right to left. To do this, select the Scroll style. You can also select one of the following chart types by clicking the Change Graph Type button on the toolbar or by pressing Ctrl+G
      1. line: This is the default setting and shows values as lines on the chart
      2. histogram: This shows a bar graph with the current, maximum, minimum, or  average counter values displayed. If you have a large number of counters, a  histogram is easier to read than a line chart.
   5. appearance: This shows a bar graph with the current, maximum, minimum, or  average counter values displayed. If you have a large number of counters, a  histogram is easier to read than a line chart.

A word or two about DCS: Data collector sets (DCSs) gather system information, including con?guration settings and performance data, and store it in a data file. You can use Performance Monitor to  examine the data ?le and analyze detailed performance data, or you can generate a report that  summarizes this information. Windows 7 Includes the following built-in DCS options.

1. system performance: use if you suspect a host is slow or is experiencing random performance problems, this specific DCS will collect and log the following counters:
   1. Network Performance (tcpip 4 and 6)
   2. Memory
   3. Processor
2. system diagnostics: use for suspect hardware or driver failures which may lead to random STOP errors, this DCS will collect and log the following counters:
   1. Network Performance (tcpip 4 and 6)
   2. memory
   3. processor
   4. other detailed system information

 To use DCS, right-click on either your custom DCS or the default System Performance or System diagnostics, and select

Using DCS to your advantage:

1. After running a DCS, you can view a summary of the data that it has gathered in the Performance Monitor\Reports node. To view the most recent report for a DCS, right-click the DCS and then click Latest Report. You can then view the report by accessing it in the Reports node.
2. sending email upon specific criteria or metric usage: You can also add performance counter alerts to DCSs. This enables you to monitor and detect an alert, which you can then use to start a batch ?le, send you. For example, if you configured an alert to trigger when free space on a logical volume falls below 30 percent, you could add this to a DCS and use it to trigger a batch ? le that archives the data on the volume.