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Summary: Still running Windows Server 2003? Besides making the well-advised recommendation of moving to Windows Server 2012, Frank Plawetzki , a Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in Germany, runs us through how to monitor servers remotely on a large scale, what to look for from a performance...

Summary : Holger Hatzfeld , a Microsoft Senior Support Escalation Engineer, provides us with a PowerShell script that deploys customizable performance logs to any or all of you domain-connected servers, effectively mimicking flight recorders for server performance capture. Powerful stuff. Hello...

Summary: Craig Forster , a Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer, runs us through how he deals with a performance issues for a file server that has plenty of RAM but, for some reason, no available memory. Hi, this is Craig Forster here. I’m hoping to shed a little light on an issue which...

Mark at AskPFEPlat digs into an Xperf startup trace and talks through identification of normal vs abnormal: In the past , I briefly talked about using the XPERF Services pane and on which to focus, but my guidance lacked clear and concise direction. So let me take another swing at this. First,...

Pedro Azevedo Lopes shares his prescription for a better-looking SQL Server in his post About Maintenance Plans – grooming SQL Server : I admit I’m not a big fan of Maintenance Plans (the feature that goes by that name) mainly because of its “do or die” approach. So, it was not by chance that I wrote...

Get the impression that PFE work with performance a lot? Well, we do. We try to ensure that whatever we’re thrown at is as optimized as it can be in the time available to us. Not content to talk about current versions of Windows, Jeff takes a dive down memory lane to cover XP startup and logon performance...

Perf PFE Jeff Stokes provides some simple steps that should produce a good boot trace for a Windows 7 machine. You have a Windows 7 host that you want to collect a trace from.  A good trace.  One that you know other people will be able to decipher as well as yourself.  Maybe I’ve asked...

Article written by Bhumit Shah, Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft India, who specializes in tuning Windows Server performance. Common questions I hear from my customers are: “ My desktops and laptops are taking long time to boot, can we find out why? ” and “ What can I do to...

How long do your enterprise desktops take to boot up to a usable state? 2 minutes? 3? 5? 10? Does this impact business productivity? Has your organization had a WDRAP (if not, then why not)? Is it all about boot times and logon times, or does it go beyond that? Are some systems sluggish all the time...

He was a skeptic, but Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Jeff Stokes has determined that Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA) , a component of the Windows Performance Toolkit (downloadable here ), offers a level of depth and insight not currently available with the classic Visual Trace Analysis tool...

Written by Mark Farrugia, Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. I recently switched disciplines in the Microsoft Premier Field Engineering (PFE) organization, changing from a Platforms-focused position to a System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr) focused role. I discovered during my ramp up that...

Written by Richard Case, Premier Field Engineer. This is the first article in a series of blog posts on collecting Microsoft Windows memory dumps for specific scenarios. Each part will detail some of the tools and techniques that can be used to capture a memory dump for that scenario. These scenarios...

Written by Tom Stumpf , Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Does Microsoft Dynamics AX have any built-in functionality for monitoring system performance? This is a question I frequently get asked, so I thought I would address it here with a quick explanation of one of the tools that AX has had for a long...

Written by Samuel Drey , Microsoft Premier Field Engineer.   I n this article, I’ll provide a quick reference guide and an Excel-based tool that allows you to build monitoring consoles using HTML without being a scripting star.  I call it the Document-Tool-Walkthrough ( DTW ). This is a new...

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...