Question : Windows 2003 Permon query

Hi

I am learning about Windows performance troubleshooting via Perfmon, and was hoping for some help.

One of the most common tickets we recv from other IT departments is that their server is running slowly. Generally, what I do is:

1. Launch Task Manager and check CPU usage
2.  Within Task Manager, look at available Physical Memory

However, I realise this is just the tip of the iceberg. For instance, there can be network issues, disk issues etc, which I guess only Perfmon will show.

So I have been reading these articles here:

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Windows-Server-2003-Performance-Tuning.html#
http://adminfoo.net/2007/04/windows-perfmon-top-ten-counters.html

But I am still having trouble with the following points -

1. For various counters, Perfmon will give me the Max, Min and Average. Is there anyway to check these figures against MS recommended values? Otherwise, these are just numbers that don't mean anything!

2. Each counter has a scale. Ok so a scale of 1.00 is easy to understand, but - for example - Avg. Disk Queue Lght has a scale of 100.00. What does this mean? Do I have to multiple the values for Max, Min, Avg etc by 100 or divide by 100?

3. I understand Pages/Sec should be less than 20. Am I right in thinking that paging is effectively using the hard disk instead of RAM, and paging > 20 means more RAM should be added?

4. What is the best counter to measure delays in the disk subsystem?

5. Let's say I want to measure performance over a 12 hour period, and then be able to go back to that "report", find out a spike and tie that into a specific time, is this possible? If so, how?

5. What is the best counter (if Pages/sec isn't) to measure memory usage?

Any help appreciated guys!

Answer : Windows 2003 Permon query

1) You need to baseline all of your servers since all the info you want is on a PER server basis in general.
Use the logging options to create baseline logs and then you will have an idea of how the perfmon  data of each server can be
set for normal performance .

Then compare the normal against the situations where there are complaints and see what has changed.

The help of perfmon gives more info

I hope this helps !