•PAL 2.0: Tame Perfmon and Simplify Windows Performance Management [PODCAST]Care of our friends over at Run As Radio, Clint Huffman talks to Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes about Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) 2.0,  a tool that saves you time by automating the analysis of Windows performance monitor (perfmon) logs. PAL makes the performance counters in perfmon far easier to manage and visualize by providing a breakdown of important counters and associated threshold values across various Microsoft products.  With PAL, you turn on perfmon, collect a log, and use the tool to easily find and uncover important numbers and trends.  The PAL tool is primarily a PowerShell script that requires arguments/parameters passed to it in order to properly analyze performance monitor logs. Some of the features of PAL 2.0:

  • Thresholds files for most of the major Microsoft products such as IIS, MOSS, SQL Server, BizTalk, Exchange, and Active Directory.
  • A GUI editor for creating or editing your own threshold files.
  • Create HTML-based reports that can be used as-is or easily imported into other applications.

    • Analyzes performance counter logs for thresholds that change based on the computer's role or hardware specs.

    Check out PAL at http://pal.codeplex.com.

    Download or listen to the podcast (37 minutes) here:   http://s3.amazonaws.com/runas/runasradio_0184_clint_huffman.mp3

    Clint Huffman Clint Huffman joined Microsoft in 1999 supporting web technologies, Microsoft load testing tools, and later worked as a Testing Consultant helping organizations with load testing at the Microsoft Services Labs. There he found a passion for solving Windows performance issues. In 2006, he joined Microsoft Premier Field Engineering (PFE). Clint strives to make performance analysis of Windows as much of a science as possible and to bring it to the masses. He’s probably best known for the Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) tool, which simplifies the analysis of performance monitor logs. He is also an author of many of the recent BizTalk performance guides on MSDN and recently spoke at Tech Ed 2008 on BizTalk performance analysis. You can find Clint's blog at http://blogs.technet.com/b/clinth/.