I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Windows Perfmon (or System Monitor if you prefer). On one hand it is an excellent tool for baseline performance analysis, and troubleshooting. But on the other hand the UI stinks and export options are severely limited. Seriously – have you ever tried to print out a Report view? Absolutely ridiculous.
While I can’t promise to solve all Perfmon’s issues with this post, I will tackle a couple big ticket items.
What’s up with the vertical lines?
Best-practices recommend grabbing statistics from a new system right after it enters production. This way you’ll have a known good baseline to refer back to in the future. Trust me – there’s nothing worse than trying to track down a performance issue with no frame of reference. Alright, enough preaching – back to the dreaded vertical lines.
Here is a screen shot of Perfmon displaying 8 hours worth of logged data.
Kind of an ugly picture with all the vertical lines, huh? Try the fix referenced in Microsoft KB article 283110 and you’ll get the following screen instead.
Now for the lack of commas
Another pet peeve of mine is the lack of commas in Perfmon’s report view. Not a big deal for some people, but when I’m looking at more than six digits in a row I get all cross-eyed. Here’s what I’m talking about.
No problem… just check out Microsoft KB article 300884 for another quick fix.
That’s all for now, folks. Hopefully after implementing these two tips your experience with Perfmon will be more love than hate.