The art of using performance monitor is a fairly easy one to acquire but can be one of the most useful skills for troubleshooting all sorts of problems. It’s been included with the Windows operating systems for many years (both server and client versions.) In this article I describe how to use Performance Monitor to create a baseline. This is the place to start so you have something compare any future monitoring sessions with.

Creating a baseline is an important step in using performance monitor as without it you have nothing to compare your data with. It should be taken when your system is running with an average load. For example if you are running a Terminal or Citrix server you may want to take a baseline reading with performance monitor before installing an application, install the application and then take the reading again using the same performance monitor counters while the application is in use. Taking the baseline reading itself has been known to throw up a few issues. If your server is a stand alone Citrix server and no users are connected to it I would be expecting the system to be pretty much “flatlining”. If one counter is alot higher than you are expecting then you can troubleshoot this before going any further.

1.) Go to start, programs, admin tools, perfmon. 
2.) Click on counter logs on the left.
3.) Add in the counters you require to run.

              Memory –          Pages Per Second
              Network –          Bytes total per second
              Physical Disk -   Average Disk Queue Length
              Processor -       %Processor Time

The above are the defaults that usually show you an overview of what’s going on on the server. I will also add in a couple more from the Terminal Server objects, in paticular the Terminal Server number of sessions counter is one that will help when monitoring as you can see how many sessions there are connected to the server.
4.) The other tabs available as you can see are Log Files and Schedule. The log file gives you various file formats you can save the information in such as text files, SQL database files and the default which is binary files. I am saving in the standard format (Binary.)

How to View the Performance Monitor Readings

When the performance monitoring has finished the log will be created with a .blg extension in the Peflogs folder (or wherever you specified this). A common and understandable mistake to make is to just double click the newly created file expecting to see the data acquired during the monitoring process. In reality this will just start monitoring the system from when you open this file. To view the logs you have just created you need to do the following.

1.) Go to start, programs, admin tools, perfmon.
2.) Click on System Monitor in the left hand pane and then the “View Log Data” option. This is the middle of the three buttons shown below.

3.) Click Log Files and Add. You can then browse to your .blg file you created earlier.
4.) At first glance you could be forgiven for thinking it hasn’t worked. It looks as if the counters aren’t there. That’s because they’re not!
5.) Click the + button on the toolbar. You will see that the only counters available are the ones that you monitored. Add each of them in.
6.) This will now show you the information created during your monitoring period.

Tip – You can press alt-tab to get a screenshot and paste into paint if you need in JPG format for reports etc.