Monitor/analyze/report resource trends on a single server-- perfmon +?
I'm running a handful of video streaming servers (Win2k3 Ent SP2). As my user base is starting to grow, individual users are beginning to report that they are experiencing less-than-ideal service.
It is my suspicion that degradation is occurring as I'm reaching the limit of my bandwidth (10Mb up). Though there is also the chance that I may be exhausting my system's resources; e.g. CPU time, RAM, etc... or possibly a badly-scaling software design which may be causing excessive thrashing.
In short, I'd like to assemble a very broad view of my resource consumption.
Perfmon (performance monitor) first came to mind. But I'm not a fan of the interface-- is it possible to export the perfmon data and generate a nice historical report? Does such a solution exist?
Solution 1:
There are a couple of really good shows on RunAs Radio about performancing monitor.
http://www.runasradio.com/default.aspx?showNum=81
http://www.runasradio.com/default.aspx?showNum=77
The first show gives good details on what you should be monitoring and why. The second is about a tool called PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs), http://www.codeplex.com/pal, which will give you reporting on the Performance Monitor data.
Solution 2:
You can use the PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs) tool for Performance Monitor logs. From an WindowsITPro article: "... our first step after the reboot was to capture a Performance Monitor log. After capturing the performance data, we copied the .blg file to our workstation for analysis, then loaded the .blg file into the PAL wizard to generate an analysis report."
There is a replacement for Performance Monitor that may meet your requirements: Magnalis PerfPro.