Level: Introductory
For years, system administrators have used the Windows Performance Monitor (Perfmon) to gather and analyze performance data. With over several hundred performance counters to consider, the task can seem overwhelming to find the relevant metrics to isolate your performance bottleneck.
Learn about your new PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs) tool. PAL is a free open source tool that has been jointly developed by Microsoft to analyze Perfmon data and identify threshold values that trigger warnings and alerts. Choose from a variety of pre-defined threshold values for environments such as Hyper-V, SQL, Exchange and SharePoint. An HTML report is produced which allows you to quickly drill down to the real bottlenecks, without being clouded with hundreds of counters.
Learn how to install PAL and generate performance reports. Understand how to interpret the reports to identify where CPU, memory or I/O bottlenecks exist and what the recommended action is. PAL will save you many hours of tediously reviewing counters by automating the process of analyzing Perfmon logs. This is one tool you will definitely want to add to your toolbox!