Friday Tips and Tricks

On a Friday am going to try and give you a useful option which has made my job easier. You may already know of it , if so ....Great ! . But If I manage to help a few people out there to do their job smarter and use our plethora of tools which we make available by various different routes then brilliant !

So my first "Friday Tip" is using Performance Monitor Smarter. In my day job as a Supportability Engineer, I often have a requirement for a customer to collect performance data, to help me analyze the problem or issue they are experiencing. This is often quite a challenge, as it can be quite difficult to ensure the customer chooses the right Objects & Counters plus choosing the right interval and sample rate and log file settings. There are a couple of ways that my colleagues have made this operation easier. This is to use the following techniques. Firstly a utility called Perfwiz This utility, which is if you follow the link is available for public download enables you to quickly in wizard format choose between three configurable options. You can then choose the server which you wish to monitor, and define whether the target server is a Terminal or Exchange Server.

You can also define the location of the performance logs and  quickly specify in a easy to use format the counters you wish to use. You will notice it also provides a range of Exchange counters as well. Once you have chosen your counters you can start logging the performance data.

 The second way we regularly use for customers is to set up the performance counters we wish to have configured, and then save them in html format. This works for Chart View,Log and Alert Settings. We can them email the settings to the customer who can simply drag and drop them into their performance view. The complete set of instructions for this can be found in the Performance help file.

Hope you find this useful !