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Troubleshooting & Analyzing Windows with Perfmon.exe

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Perfmon.exe

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Performance Measurements

  • 5 major hardware subsystems impacted by the operating systems and applications
    • CPU
    • Memory
    • Storage
    • Network
    • GPU

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Default analysis of your system

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Perfmon reports and files

  • C:\PerfLogs

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Real-time, logging or debugging (event trace)

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Windows Performance Counters

  • collecting various kinds of system data such as processor, memory, and disk usage statistics. 
  • System administrators use performance counters to monitor for performance or behavior problems. 
  • Software developers use performance counters to inspect the resource usage of their components.
  • Hardware engineers use it to confirm or troubleshoot hardware behavior.

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Warning use them sparingly

  • Use a few as possible to avoid server impact
  • they are not designed to be collected more than once per second

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Perfmon:  Two critical components

  • Choosing the correct counters to monitor
  • Understanding the threshold values for your server/desktop/application/hardware configuration

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When using Perfmon use technical references

  • When selecting counters and threshold values for analysis or troubleshooting:  
    • Use Microsoft documentation 
    • Use Developer documentation
    • Use Hardware documentation
    • Vendor documentation
    • Use third party if necessary

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Proper sizing of a virtual machine memory

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  • Microsoft's recommendation for analyzing a virtual machine's proper memory allocation.

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Perfmon can collect 2 types of data

  • Performance counters are measurements of system state or activity. 
    • They can be included in the operating system or can be part of individual applications.
  • Event trace data (think of this as debug) is collected from trace providers, which are components of the operating system or of individual applications that report actions or events. 

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Performance counters

  • Performance counters:
    • are simple numeric metrics that give you a high-level summary of how a particular system is behaving
      • example, % Processor Time is a performance counter that tells you how much of the processor's time is being used to execute user-mode code.
    • Performance counters are generally used to monitor system health and to diagnose specific performance issues
    • NOTE:  they don't give you much detail as to why a particular issue is happening

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Performance Counters are used by:

  • Perfmon.exe
  • Task Manager
  • Process Explorer
  • Process Monitor
  • Process Hacker
  • Resource Monitor (resmon.exe)
  • Log manager (logman.exe)
  • Typeperf.exe
  • 3-party software

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Event Tracing for Windows (ETW)

  • ETW is a tracing system built into Windows. 
  • Essentially, any component (e.g. a user application, or even the Windows kernel itself) can send out diagnostic trace information about specific events that occur that the component cares about. 
    • For example, the kernel sends out ETW events when a process starts and stops
    • when an image (e.g. DLL) is loaded and unloaded
    • when a thread is created or destroyed
    • when a thread does a context switch.
  • ETW is meant to be fast and should not materially impact the system's performance when logging is not enabled.

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Event Trace files: *.etl

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*.etl files on my video editor

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Better way:

IT professionals should use two tools for recording trace events and displaying and analyzing.

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Effective tool for recording trace events

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Windows Performance Analyzer

  • WPA allows a more effective way to analyze trace events

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Performance Monitoring

How many performance counters are built into Windows 10?

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3840 counters

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Why hasn't Microsoft invested in a better PM?

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15-30 major vendors provide this service

  • Microsoft's Operations Manager
  • Solarwinds
  • Paessler
  • Atera
  • Sematext
  • Site24x7

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Low budget/free tools to help the poor?

  • GitHub
  • Free tool allowing analysis of performance counters using industry threshold data 

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https://github.com/clinthuffman/PAL

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  • Thresholds files for most of the major Microsoft products such as IIS, MOSS, SQL Server, BizTalk, Exchange, and Active Directory.
  • An easy to use GUI interface which makes creating batch files for the PAL.ps1 script.
  • A GUI editor for creating or editing your own threshold files.
  • Creates an HTML based report for ease of copy/pasting into other applications.
  • Analyzes performance counter logs for thresholds using thresholds that change their criteria based on the computer's role or hardware specs.

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ETW is a part of WMI

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