WINDOWS 1002000 PROFESSIONAL RESOURCE KIT [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Quick Guide to Monitoring Performance

Use this quick guide to view the topics and tasks related to monitoring tools and processes in Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Professional covered in this chapter.

Learn about the operation of performance monitoring tools in Windows 2000 Professional for the purpose of preventive maintenance and diagnosis of performance problems.

By using the performance monitoring tools provided in Windows 2000 Professional for real-time observation and periodic logging, you can acquire important information about the health of your system. To use the tools efficiently, it is important to know how data is collected, what types of data are collected, and how to use the data to keep your system at its best.

See "Performance Monitoring Concepts" and "Monitoring Tools" later in the chapter.

Set up a basic monitoring configuration.

Routine performance monitoring starts with establishing a default set of counters to track. This can be the set used for establishing a performance baseline. A performance baseline is the level of performance you can reliably expect during typical usage and workloads.

See "Starting Your Monitoring Routine" later in this chapter.

Interpret data you collect.

The data you collect about system performance provides important indicators as to the efficiency of your system. However, data can sometimes be misleading and needs to be analyzed carefully if you are to have an accurate picture of the health of your system and to correctly diagnose problems.

See "Analyzing Monitoring Results" later in this chapter.

Research the cause of bottlenecks prior to attempting corrective actions.

A bottleneck in one resource can come in combination with one in another resource. An analytical approach to investigating bottlenecks is important to determining the correct solution.

See "Investigating Bottlenecks" later in this chapter.

Be aware of issues with the performance tools.

Occasionally you might have trouble collecting data or the data might seem inappropriate. If this occurs, make sure you understand some of the issues that can arise with the performance tools and how to respond to them.

See "Troubleshooting Problems with Performance Tools" later in this chapter.

Learn about monitoring remote computers.

There are security and performance considerations associated with monitoring remote computers. If you intend to track data from counters on other computers on a network, make sure you are aware of these considerations.

See "Monitoring Remote Computers" later in this chapter.

Experiment with using the System Monitor control in Office applications.

One of the benefits of the new design of the System Monitor control that provides the functionality of System Monitor in the Performance console is its ability to be used within Microsoft® Word or other Microsoft® Office applications. By learning about this capability, you can more fully integrate monitoring data into your management reporting.

See "Integrating the System Monitor Control into Office and Other Applications" later in this chapter.

Users of Microsoft® Windows® 98 and Microsoft® Windows NT® Workstation version 4.0 will notice a few changes in Microsoft® Windows® 2000 with respect to performance monitoring tools. The following list provides a brief summary of the changes in features for these operating systems:

Windows 98 users will notice that the tool named System Monitor differs significantly from the one provided in Windows 98 and from its predecessor, Performance Monitor, in Windows NT Workstation. The new tool supports printing and HTML output, as well as flexible configuration using colors, fonts, and highlighting. In addition, System Monitor in Windows 2000 can read data as it is being logged using the new Performance Logs and Alerts service. This service, new to users of Performance Monitor in Windows NT Workstation 4.0, can log data or generate alerts automatically on a user-defined schedule, even on unattended systems. The service also supports the new trace logging capability, whereby performance data is traced rather than sampled for greater accuracy.

The new System Monitor exposes a much greater variety and level of detail in terms of the data that can be configured to be collected over what was available in Windows 98. System Monitor also uses different terminology to describe the performance data it collects: objects, counters, and instances rather than items. Users of Windows NT Workstation will also find that there are several new default objects and many new optional objects that can be installed by Windows 2000 services and features. In addition, counters can collect data from the registry, as in Windows NT Workstation, or from the Windows Management Interface, new to Windows 2000.

System Monitor in Windows 2000 is instrumented as an ActiveX® control and is therefore portable for use in Microsoft Office applications and Web pages, providing more flexibility and extensibility over Performance Monitor in Windows NT Workstation 4.0. The Performance console that contains System Monitor is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in that can be configured and loaded on other computers for monitoring purposes.

Unlike System Monitor in Windows 98, System Monitor in Windows 2000 is installed by default. Unlike Windows NT Workstation 4.0, in Windows 2000 Professional, the Administrative Tools menu, in which the Performance console resides, is not available by default. Instead you need to add the Administrative Tools menu to the Start menu. The Administrative Tools also appears as an icon in Control Panel.

Although, in general, Windows 2000 Task Manager offers access to a larger selection of data than Resource Meter in Windows 98, the two tools share some similarities in purpose and operation. For example, both tools provide general data on system resource utilization. In addition, with both tools you can view data in a window or as an icon in the taskbar. Updated from Windows NT Workstation 4.0, Task Manager can be configured to display the number of I/O operations as well as the number of GDI Objects and USER Objects information, thus expanding the usage data shown by the User Resources and GDI Resources progress indicators in Resource Meter.