I'm speaking at TechEd 2008 This Year!

I'm proud to announce that I will be speaking at TechEd 2008 this year in Orlando, Florida. It will be a 1 hour chalk talk during the ITPro week (June 10th - 13th, 2008). I hope to see some of the PAL tool users there! :-)

My session will be on Microsoft BizTalk Server Performance Analysis. This session covers how to leverage performance counters and various tools to identify performance bottlenecks in Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006. This session includes a brief introduction to the PAL tool (Performance Analysis of Logs tool). BizTalk has over 300 performance counters, so having an automated tool will helps with analysis.

My PAL tool is a free download at https://www.codeplex.com/PAL. It analyzes performance monitor counter logs (*.blg) and creates an HTML report showing where the counters broke known thresholds. It's not your typical tool. It questions the user about more information about the server where the counter log was capture and uses those answers as variables in the thresholds. The thresholds are actual code that is executed at runtime. I wrote it because I teach performance analysis to customers and analyzing perf counter logs can be a very time consuming process. The tool does not replace normal performance analysis, but is simply a time saver letting you know what to and what not to look at. Even though I wrote it, I can't take credit for all of it. My team, Microsoft Premier Field Engineering (PFE) and Microsoft Customer Support Services (CSS) helped out a lot with creating the thresholds.