Welcome back to your free Windows 7 training.
In this video I will look at how to monitor the performance of Windows 7 using the performance
monitor and data collector sets.
The performance monitor gives you statistics on how much load your hardware is under on
your computer.
As you will see, there is almost an endless amount of measurements that can be taken using
the performance monitor.
To use the performance monitor, you need to know which statistics, called counters that
you want to track.
Data collector sets allow you to group together counters from the performance monitor and
other areas of the system.
Once these settings have been decided, they can be scheduled to be captured at certain
times of the day or run any time that you want.
The advantage of this is that it allows you to automate the capture of performance statistics
giving you a history of performance.
The reports created by data collector sets are easier to read than the charts in the
performance monitor.
The data captured by data collector sets can be completely customized or you can use the
pre-defined options provided by Microsoft.
Microsoft has spent a lot of time with data collector sets determining which statistics
most administrators would want to view.
This saves you the hard work of trying to figure out which performance settings you
should be tracking.
Once you start capturing statistics like these, it gives you a history of the performance
of that computer.
These statistics can help you locate what is called a bottleneck.
A bottleneck is when the entire computer performance is limited by a single component.
A common bottleneck is RAM.
If you do not have enough RAM in your computer, this will cause the hard disk to be used for
virtual RAM.
This will slow down the entire system.
By installing more RAM, you will see an increase in the performance of the complete system.
Other bottlenecks include slow hard disks and CPU’s.
Upgrading these or installing additional hard disks and CPU’s can greatly increase the
speed of the computer.
Tools like data collector sets help you locate these bottlenecks.
Regardless of whether you decide to use the performance monitor or data collector sets,
you will need to have permission to do so.
In order to see real time information in the performance monitor, you need to be a member
of the performance monitor group.
If you are a member of the performance log users group, you will be able to see real
time information as well as make changes to data collector sets.
Of course, if you are a member of the administrators group you don’t need to be a member of these
groups.
I will now change to my Windows 7 computer and look at how to configure the performance
monitor and data collector sets.
To start the performance monitor, open the control panel and select system and security
and then select administrative tools at the bottom.
From administrative tools, select performance monitor.
Data collector sets and performance monitor are both found in here.
First of all I will look at the performance monitor.
When I first select performance monitor found under monitoring tools, a graph will appear.
This graph tracks the counter that measures in real time the percentage of the CPU that
is being used.
To add additional counters, press the green plus button at the top.
When I expand the processor section, notice that there are a lot of different counters
to choose from.
How much processor is being used as a percentage is the most commonly used counter; however,
you could track how much CPU is being used by the operating system, your applications
or even one particular application.
Each counter may also have different instances that you can choose from.
If this computer had more than one CPU I could track just one CPU or core.
The default option will combine statistics from all CPU’s on the computer into one.
When I scroll down you can see how many counters there are.
The list seems almost endless when you also consider that each section can be expanded.
In most cases you will measure counters on the CPU, memory and the hard disk to get an
understanding of the performance of your computer.
If I scroll up to memory, I can add the counter available Mbytes.
This will show how many megabytes are available to applications.
In some cases you may know what the counter measures but a lot of counter names are quite
cryptic as to what they measure.
To find out what a counter does, select the option at the bottom show description.
Once you have which counter you want press the button add and press o.k. and the counter
will be added.
The counter has been added with the same colour as the CPU so I will open the properties and
change the colour to blue.
As you can imagine, it can take a long time to go through the 100’s of counters and
choose the ones that you want.
You may also want to capture data at certain times of the day for benchmarking and statistical
purposes.
This is where data collector sets come into play.
If I select data collector sets and expand system, there are two data collector sets
created by default.
These are system diagnostics and system performance.
To start the data collector set, right click the data collector set and select the option
start.
To see the results from the data collector set, expand the reports section.
Notice that when I open the report the status is shown as collecting data for 60 seconds.
I will pause the video and return once Windows has finished capturing statistics.
Microsoft has done a lot of research into finding the most commonly used statistics
that administrators use and place them in this data collector set.
In most cases if you just simply want to find a bottleneck in a system or create a benchmark
for a system, the default data collector set should work quite well.
At the top you have some statistics on CPU, network, disk and memory use captured in the
one minute while the data collector set was running.
When I scroll down, you can see that there is a lot more information that you can drill
down into that may help you solve problems on your computer.
For example, under disk there is a section called hot files.
These are the files that had the most disk activity in the minute the data collector
was running.
If your computer performance is slow and there is a lot of hard disk activity, this may give
you an indication as to what is causing the problem.
For example, if the paging file was at the top, the system may need more RAM.
Just remember that these statistics were gathered over a minute.
If a large job requiring more RAM was running at the same time the data collector set was
running, it may have caused a lot of paging.
If this was an unusual occurrence, then you may not need additional RAM.
It is important to look carefully at these statistics and work out what they are telling
you.
Scrolling down, there are statistics on how much RAM certain processes are using.
If you are running low on RAM, this can tell you which applications are using the RAM.
Instead of installing more RAM, you may decide to move an application to another server or
you may see if the application has the option to reduce the amount of RAM that it is using.
The default data collector set can’t be changed; however, it can be used as a template
or you can completely create one from scratch.
If I right click on user defined under data collector sets and select new, I can create
a new data collector set.
In most cases it is easier to leave it on the default create from a template and add
counters to an existing data collector set.
The second option will allow the data collector set to be created manually.
On the next screen you can decide which data collector set to use as a template.
I will leave it on the default and move on.
The next screen asks where you want to save the data collector set.
I will leave it in the default location.
On the next screen, if you click on change, you can choose which user will be allowed
to run the data collector set.
The default system user will work fine for our purposes, so I will leave it on the default
and finish the wizard.
The default data collector set cannot be scheduled but a user defined one can.
Since I have created a user defined data collector set, I can open the properties for that data
collector set and change options that are not available in the default data collector
set.
On the schedule tab, I can press the button add and select when I want the data collector
to run.
In this case I will run the data collector set at 10 o’clock on week days only.
This way I can get a good indication of how Windows is running when it should be under
some load.
Running a data collector set when the system is idle generally does not give you a lot
of useful information.
On the stop condition tab, options can be configured on how long the data collector
set will run.
By default it will run for a minute so I will change that to 10 minutes so it can capture
more statistics.
Remember that running data collector sets and the performance monitor does put a little
load on the system.
Some performance settings use more system resources than others and thus it is not recommended
that you run them for long periods of time unless you have a good reason to do so.
The overall duration setting determines the maximum amount of time the data collector
can run.
When this value is reached the data collector set will stop collecting data.
The option “restart the data collector set at limits” tick box will restart the data
collector when one of the limits listed is reached.
For example, if you set the duration option, then when the duration limit is reached, the
data collector set will be restarted and a new report will be created.
If the value was set to five minutes, two reports will be created in the 10 minute period
during which the data collector set is running.
You can also tick the option maximum size if you want to ensure that the data files
for the reports are not getting too large.
If the option “restart the data collector set at limits” was not ticked, then the
data collector set would be stopped if either of these limits was configured and reached.
My custom data collector set is now created and configured to run automatically.
Reports for this data collector set will automatically be added to the report section at the bottom.
That’s it for the performance monitor and data collector sets.
In the next video I will look at other performance options that can be configured in order to
improve the performance of Windows 7.
Thanks for watching another free video from IT Free Training.