Background: In an earlier post I talked about some new features for Windows 2008 and Vista.  One of those new features that is often overlooked are the data collector sets (DCS).  One particular role that leverages data collector sets is active directory.  Active directory has put “hooks...

Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) tool Project Description: Ever have a performance problem, but don't know what performance counters to collect or how to analyze them? The PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs) tool is a new and powerful tool that reads in a performance monitor counter log (any known format...

Yes you are going to want Windows 2008 in your shop.  We've been running 2k8 for over two year sin production and I'm very proud of the product we're shipping shortly.  Some of you will want to start thinking about what's new in the OS, what has changed, performance, and deployment.  Here...

When troubleshooting latency issues I've found it helpful to have firm numbers of how long it took for a command to run? For instance we were looking at an issue where net viewing a server took a long time, but we didn't have firm number of how long it took each time to compare with healthy servers....

Just noticed the AD jigsaw poster has been updated for 2k8. So next time your boss asks you "What do say you do here?", don't reply with I'm a people person! Do the following: 1) Download one of the jigsaw posters from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c2b9e44e-0bbd-47cb-bc09-b3d48be7f867&DisplayLang...

I was tracking a high CPU issue this week and needed to know when one of my servers was pegged so I could investigate. I could of used perfmon I guess but I really like to do everything I can from the command prompt. I always like it when there is a tool that can do data collection from the command prompt...

Windows System state analyzer tool Helps create snapshots of the computer—some of which include fixed drives, services, drivers and the registry. Users can create two snapshots at different points in time and compare them to view differences. A detailed report could be generated at the end of a compare...

First off you can download SPA 2.0 here . I'm going to explain how to quickly use SPA, and then what type of data is returned in this post. What is SPA? So what is SPA and how can you use it? Well the official overview is: Microsoft ® Windows Server ™ 2003 Performance Advisor is the latest version of...

We all have managers and ALL managers love that little word called metrics, and ALL managers like to know that their service has 99.99% uptime. So how can you easily get this information off a Windows server? Well there is a simple tool out there called uptime.exe . To get the uptime of a server use...