[General] Perfmon for windows performance metrics

Perfmon(Performance Monitor) is a Microsoft utility which includes Performance counters for monitoring different aspects of system performance. You can use these counters to measure both hardware and software performance. Not only a real time value updation/graphical display of the monitoring counters but also performance logs can be saved. These Performance logs will help you know the patterns of a specific counter for a period of time, and help you locate/diagnose bottlenecks that can slow down your system. Following sections explains how to use performance monitor for watching performance counters and how to save it to file.

Starting Perfmon & adding counters

1). Go to Start menu, select Run. Type perfmon and press OK.

2). Perfmon by default display/monitor the counters,

-Pages/Sec(Memory)

-Avg.Disk Queue Length(Physical Disk)

-% Processor Time(Processor).

3). For adding new counters right click and select Add Counters. Select Performance Object from the drop down, select Performance Counter from the list and Instances from the list. Press Add button and Close the Add Counters dialog. Now you can see the value & graph plotting.

Perfmon main window

Adding Counter


Select Object,Counters & instances

Saving Log file

1). Expand Performance Logs and Alerts tree item in the left pane of the Perfmon and select Counter logs.

2). Right click on the Perfmon right pane shown and choose New Log Settings. Enter the name of the log you want to have and press OK.

3). Press the Add Counters button on the log configuration dialog shown and choose the needed counters to monitor and save to file.

4). You can configure many options such as data capture Interval, Log file type, Schedule etc in the Log Configuration dialog.

Adding new log setting

Adding counter for logging and configuring.