PerfMon # 1: What is PERFMON or Performance Monitor:

PerfMon # 1:

What is PERFMON or Performance Monitor:

 

This is what TechNet says about PerfMon:

You can use Windows Performance Monitor to examine how programs you run affect your computer's performance, both in real time and by collecting log data for later analysis.

Performance Monitor is a simple yet powerful visualization tool for viewing performance data, both in real time and from log files. With it, you can examine performance data in a graph, histogram, or report.

Now, what I say:

n  PerfMon is a native tool built-in in Windows client & server computers.

n  It uses very small amount of resource while running.

n  It captures predefined performance data (counters) in predefined intervals.

That means if you configured it to capture CPU Time (or memory or disk) in every 5 minutes interval, then it will write CPU Time in every 5 minutes (in a log file with extension .BLG) until you stop it or it reaches to its limit. We will discuss more about its configuration details in a moment.

n  Using this tool you can monitor live performance statistics of your local machine or multiple remote machines.

 

Note: In this first PERFMON post we will discuss only about .BLG logs. In future (maybe) I will write about .ETL log capture in PerfMon as well.

Reference:

1.   Using Performance Monitor:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749115(v=ws.11).aspx

 

2.   Windows Performance Monitor:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749249(v=ws.11).aspx

In next post we will talk about configuring PerfMon using command line and GUI. Stay tuned ...