Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
resource element displays hard (page) faults per second in the green bar (more on hard page fault
later in this chapter), and the percentage of physical memory in use is shown in blue.
Data Collector Sets
Data Collector Sets combine all the information necessary for common problem diagnostics,
including event tracing, performance counters, and coni guration (Registry and WMI classes).
Administrators can create Data Collector Sets with providers enabled for trace and counter data.
Once a collector set has been dei ned, it is stored in Reliability and Performance Monitor. This
enables starting and stopping the collector at any point in the future without recreating it, or it can
be controlled on a schedule.
Three pre-dei ned system Data Collector Sets are included: LAN Diagnostics, System Diagnostics,
and System Performance. Each collects performance counters, trace data, and system coni guration
for common troubleshooting scenarios.
Reliability Monitor
Reliability Monitor provides a system stability chart. Here, events such as hardware failures, or
application or Windows failures, are tracked against a timeline. The data presented by Reliability
Monitor provides access to failure activity information, plotted against a time chart to facilitate cor-
relation between failure events and system activity (software installation or uninstallation, etc.).
The chart displayed by Reliability Monitor plots the
System Stability Index
, a rating system rel ect-
ing reliability where 10 is a stable server and 1 is considered an unstable server. The purpose of the
System Stability Index is to assist in correlating a decrease in system stability with a specii c change
(such as a new device driver or a hoti x installation).
PerfMon Usability in Windows Server 2008
There are some user interface enhancements for PerfMon in Windows Server 2008 (compared with
Windows Server 2003 and earlier). There are relatively minor changes between Windows Server
2008 and the R2 release; this section contains a summary of the highlights.
Auto-Scaling Counters
In early versions of Windows Server, counter values were often either off the top of the PerfMon
graph or dwarfed by other counters — neither situation enabled users to easily see changes in these
values. This made scaling counters a painful process of trial and error, as each counter had to be
selected in turn in an attempt to choose a reasonable value to scale the counter by. The process was
made much simpler in Windows Server 2008 because users could select a group of counters, right-
click, and choose “Scale selected counters.” Windows then adjusted the scale of each counter to a
reasonable value so that all lines are plotted in or around the middle of the graph.
NOTE
Always be aware of auto-scaling in PerfMon. Check the scaling of counters
before comparing multiple counters, particularly when comparing between servers.
Auto-scaling can adjust instances of the same counter to use different scales.
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