Friday, March 4, 2011

Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) and Server Performance Advisor (SPA) for Windows Server 2003

 If Performance Monitor Logs and Alerts is giving you an headache these tools will help you make your life easyer doing the performance analysis for you:

"Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Performance Advisor v2.0 is the latest version of Server Performance Advisor, which is a simple but robust tool that helps you diagnose the root causes of performance problems in a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 deployment. It measures the performance and use of resources by your computer to report on the parts that are stressed under workload. It does so by collecting performance data and generating comprehensive diagnostic reports that give you the data to easily analyze problems and develop corrective actions.
SPA provides several specialized reports, including a System Overview (focusing on CPU usage, Memory usage, busy files, busy TCP clients, top CPU consumers) and built-in template reports for server roles such as Active Directory, Internet Information System (IIS), DNS, Terminal Services, SQL, print spooler, and others. In fact, SPA is kind of a Performance Monitor tool that is integrated with Network Monitor and has a built-in logic that allows for easier understanding of the captured data and can help you identify clients or applications that are consuming resources on a server."

For more information click here : Petri IT Knowledgebase it is a great article. It was pointless for me to do the same article.

PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs) tool is a new and powerful tool that reads in a performance monitor counter log (any known format) and analyzes it using complex, but known thresholds (that are provided). The tool comes out-of-the-box with some predefined thresholds defined as high according to the Microsoft consulting/development but those can be adjusted to whatever you like.
The tool generates an HTML based report which graphically charts important performance counters and throws alerts when thresholds are exceeded. The thresholds are originally based on thresholds defined by the Microsoft product teams and members of Microsoft support, but continue to be expanded by this ongoing project. This tool is not a replacement of traditional performance analysis, but it automates the analysis of performance counter logs enough to save you time.

Features


  • Thresholds files for most of the major Microsoft products such as IIS, MOSS, SQL Server, BizTalk, Exchange, and Active Directory.
  • An easy to use GUI interface which makes creating batch files for the PAL.vbs script.
  • A GUI editor for creating or editing your own threshold files.
  • Creates an HTML based report for ease of copy/pasting into other applications.
  • Analyzes performance counter logs for thresholds using thresholds that change their criteria based on the computer's role or hardware specs.
 You can download it from here.PAL is greater after me because you can use it on any operating system you like.(Tested on Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 R2)
Note: In Windows 2003 Server sp2 and Windows 2003 Server R2 sp2 it has a little bug that you can export the Treshold Files in html format only in the root folder of the application(C:\Program Files\PAL\PAL v2.0.7).
Another thing that is problematic is that you need to change your Regional and Language Options to Standards:English(United States) & Location:United States otherwise it won't run.

Both applications are free for home and business use.

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