If you consider troubleshooting as an art, Perfmon will be one of the brushes – almost like sable. If you master it well, you can not only tell a lot about your server’s performance, you will also be able to take a lot of actions pro-actively even before anything breaks down.

In this post, let me quickly show how you can create various counters and set it up on your IIS/SharePoint Servers.

    Click Start –> Run –> Perfmon (Click Ok)
    Right click on Counter Logs under Performance Logs and Alerts and select New Log Settings.

    Type a name and click Ok.

    You will see the following dialog…

    Click on Add Objects…

    Select all the counters that you want… (if you are not aware of which all counters should you baseline at the minimum, read on…), click Add and Close.
    Set the Interval to 1 minute

    If you wish to change the Log Files location (Current Log File Name) you will need to switch to the Log Files folder.

    Once done, you will see our Perfmon counter set running and collecting the data samples every 1 minute. Keep in mind that you should not ALWAYS have 1 minute interval. In case you are working with an IIS Hang or High CPU scenario, you should add the Thread Counter as well and ensure that the interval is set to something like 10 seconds.

   Let it run for 8 hrs, and click Stop. You have just collected your IIS Baseline logs for that 8 hours. It is a good practice to have an archival policy of this Perfmon. Something like a one day Perfmon data collection every Monday, or so on.
    You may be having a plenty of servers where you want to repeat the same exercise of setting up the perfmon counters. Use Save Settings As in the image above and save it as an htm file.
    Now open this htm file in Notepad and you will be able to see something like this…

      Let’s say you want the same counters on any other machine called “MOSS2”, you may need to replace the highlighted sections above. So, location may remain the same… and \\MOSS should be changed to \\MOSS2 and so on. Once done with changing the server and location names, save this file and switch to MOSS2
    Right click on Counter Logs and select New Log Settings From

    Select the htm file that you have just modified, and you will get another prompt like this… click OK and you are done. Right click on this counter set and select Start.

    I have attached this baseline counter, in case you are feeling a bit lazy

Hope this helps,
Rahul

Quote of the day:
But in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. - Benjamin Franklin