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SolarWinds’ Orion performance monitor will help you discover what’s happening on your network. Guy Recommends: A Free Trial of the Network Performance Monitor (NPM) v11.5 Furthermore, you can drill down for extra details. At each stage the menu headings, give you a hint of whether the statistics are normal or indicate a bottleneck. (You can either right-click and manually stop, or just wait for the end of the scheduled collection.) As someone who started with perfmon in NT 3.51, I cannot emphasise enough how much easier the Reports make it to interpret the data. Once the set has finished collecting the data, navigate to the Reports sub-folder. The next decision is do you manually right-click and ‘Start’ collecting, or do you configure the Schedule tab in the Data Set’s properties. Windows 7 gives you a bewildering choice of performance counters, and you can save a lot of time by accepting the wizard’s suggestion to use the big four keywords (counters): CPU, Memory, Disk and Network. If a server, or even a desktop machine, is running slowly, then you need to find the bottleneck. Another useful troubleshooting tactic is to run WMI (Windows Management Interface) tasks after the Data Collector finishes. All you need to do is experiment with different thresholds and rules for scheduling data collection. These Sets also combine the old Alert feature of Performance Monitor. Sets can contain readings from Performance counters, Event trace data, System configuration information and even registry values. Furthermore, the Performance Monitor provides a tailor-made report structure so that we can review these logs.
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What a Data Collector Set does is capture multiple statistics and save them into a permanent record. Remember to look in the Reports folders to see the results of you Data Collector Set. If you suspect a disk is about to fail, or have a driver problem then run a diagnostic test. If a computer is responding slowly, then create a performance collector set to see if the root cause is due to a CPU, RAM or a disk problem. Bear in mind that there are quick alternatives such as Resource Monitor. This is an ideal technique to diagnose problems not only on Windows 7 desktop machines, but also on Server 2008. In a nutshell you use the Windows 7 Data Collector Sets when you have a performance or a connectivity impediment and you want to gather the facts.
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Creating a Data Collection Set is Windows 7’s new way of Performance monitoring.
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