Chapter 3. Collecting and analyzing performance counter data
Most of the time, performance management is a topic that interests IT pros who have to troubleshoot performance issues. But assessing performance can be important in a number of other scenarios, such as before you upgrade a machine to new hardware, before updating an application to a newer version, when defining performance baselines, or, worse, when users are complaining because their desktop PC or their business application is performing badly.
The good news is that Windows embeds all the technologies that allow you to collect bunches of valuable data, from the global CPU, memory, network, and disk I/O usage data to detailed information like the resource consumption of a specific process.
In this chapter, I’ll cover how to collect, store, and analyze performance counter data using a dedicated set of PowerShell cmdlets. But first I’ll talk a bit about the API that PowerShell relies on and what this API can do.
The technology called Performance Logs and Alerts (PLA) is both a protocol and a software component for logging diagnostic data on remote computers or on local computers as well. The software component is a set of DCOM interfaces. To summarize, PLA allows you to
