Performance Monitor lets you set up views for charts, alerts, logs, and reports. When you start using Performance Monitor to find bottlenecks in the system, you may find it useful to set up more than one type of view. Using multiple views at the same time gives you a better representation of what is actually happening in your system. For instance, Log view (which occurs over a long period of time) may show you trends which you would not notice in Chart view.
When you set up multiple views, you create a workspace. You can preserve the workspace, thus preserving the complete configuration of all views you are using. To preserve a workspace, save the view configurations in a workspace settings (.PMW) file.
When you begin troubleshooting a performance problem, you will most likely want to start with Chart view. Chart view shows you the current activity of the selected counters and instances. You can customize each chart (by adding or deleting objects, counters, and instances) to create a chart that lets you monitor many different types of performance. You can change chart selections, such as chart scale or counter display colors, to make your charts more readable.
When you add objects to a chart, you can use the Explain button to learn more about what each counter is used for. You can use the Chart Options dialog box to change the update time, to display in histogram mode, or to change many other Chart view options.
You can use Log view to document activity and trends over a long period of time. Log view takes whole objects with all their counters for all instances, and it writes all of this data to a log file. These log files can get very large, so use caution when setting up logging.
It is often a good idea to begin by logging the Logical Disk, Memory, Process, Processor, System, and Thread objects. You configure the log in the Log Options dialog box. You must specify the log file name and update interval before you can start logging. When you are ready to start logging, select the Start Log button.
The Log View window displays the log file, file size, logging status, and log interval while logging is enabled. Monitor the size of the log file to ensure that it does not become too large. When you want to stop logging, go back to the Log Options dialog box and select the Stop Logging button.
To view the log, select Options, Data From, and specify the log file name.
The log can be exported with comma or tab delimited columns for analysis in a spreadsheet or database.
You can configure Performance Monitor alerts to notify you if the system seems to be reaching a critical state in a key area. For instance, you can set alerts to be generated if Logical Disk: % Free Space, or Memory: Available Bytes falls below 20 percent, or if System: Processor Queue Length exceeds 3.
You can configure Performance Monitor to carry out one or more of the following actions when an alert is generated: