When something goes wrong with an app or device,
there's no source of truth more trusty or versatile
than Windows performance counters.
Hi, I'm Jeff Woolsey and this is one in a series of videos
that shows you what's new in Windows Admin Center.
Windows Admin Center allows you to streamline
everyday tasks and connect to Azure for hybrid scenarios.
In this video, Cosmos Darwin shows you how to use
Windows Admin Center to see a reimagined
Performance Monitor tool. Let's get started.
Cosmos: As the administrator of Windows computers and servers,
you deserve great tools to understand how apps,
devices, and features of the operating system
are working. And when something is broken or slow,
one of the most trusty, versatile tools that you have
are Windows performance counters.
Unfortunately, the user interface for looking at
performance counters, Performance Monitor or perfmon.exe--
well, it used to look like this.
And let's be honest, it still looks like this.
Well, today, that's about to change. Show of hands--
who has used Performance Monitor before?
Yeah, everybody, alright. Well buckle up because I think
you're going to like this.
In Windows Admin Center version 1910,
you'll see a new tool with an old name: Performance Monitor.
Let me show you how it works.
The first thing you need to do is choose the counter object
that you want to monitor. Now, you've seen this before.
This big long list of counters that you have to scroll through.
Except now you don't have to scroll anymore,
because you can just search and it filters and finds the
counters that you're looking for. Yeah.
Next, you pick an instance, and you pick the actual counter
that you want to see. And just like that in a couple of
clicks, you have an interactive graph right here
in the browser, streaming the real time data for that
performance counter. It has all of the modern
affordances you expect. Like you can resize it,
the axes adjust. There are tooltips.
One of the important scenarios with Performance Monitor is
comparing different counters, and I can absolutely do that here.
I can add a second graph with a different set of counters.
For example, memory counters to compare against performance
for processor. Now take a look at what happens here. I'm going to
select the Page Faults counter that I'm interested in
and notice that Performance Monitor understands which other
counters I'm probably going to want based on my selection
and it highlights those for me, so that I can easily choose them.
I'll pick a couple more and add them to the graph.
Now if we fast forward a second so that we have a full-screen’s
worth of data, look at this. I can browse all of the graphs
at the same time with this beautiful shared hairline across the graphs.
I have effects like I can hover over a legend to see a
particular series very clearly. All in this intuitive and
visually engaging way.
If I want to look for a correlation or inspect
a particular point in time I can pause the graph
and go in and take a closer look.
I can highlight a particular series. I can even
expand the graph vertically so that I can get
a little more space to see what's going on here.
And I can really perform the kind of analysis that people
use performance monitor for.
When I'm done, I can resume.
Now so far, everything I've showed has used the line graph,
but we know that there are times
when you want to see every counter
from every instance all at the same time.
And so that trusty report view that we know you love
is still there and you have all of the same richness, all the
same data that's been available forever in performance monitor.
And once you arrange the view just the way you want it
with the graphs and the counters that you care about,
you can save your workspace,
so that you can easily get back to it later.
So say I'll name this one Cosmos’s Troubleshooting View.
And you'll see on the landing screen of Performance Monitor,
you can see now your own saved workspaces
down at the bottom, and of course, you can create
as many of these views as you need.
They’re automatically shared across all the servers
that you manage with Windows Admin Center,
and you can share them with other people like
your colleagues as well.
So that is just a quick look at some of
what's in the new Performance Monitor.
What do you think of what you've seen so far?
All right.
If you're as excited about this as we are you can try it today.
It's available right now as part of
Windows Admin Center version 1910.
It works with Windows Server and Windows 10,
the latest version and some older versions.
In the cloud and on prem.
You deserve great tools,
and we want you to have them.