Windows Reliability and Performance Monitor
is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in that provides tools for
analyzing system performance. From a single console, you can monitor
application and hardware performance in real time, customize what data
you want to collect in logs, define thresholds for alerts and automatic
actions, generate reports, and view past performance data in a variety
of ways.
An important feature in Windows Reliability and Performance Monitor is the Data Collector Set (DCS),
which groups data collectors into reusable elements. After a Data
Collector Set is defined, you can schedule the collection of data using
the DCS or see it in real time.
Windows Reliability and Performance Monitor consists of three monitoring tools:
Resource View
Performance Monitor
Reliability Monitor
To start the Reliability and Performance Monitor, follow these steps:
1. | Click Start, right-click Computer, and click Manage.
|
2. | Expand System Tools and click Reliability and Performance.
|
Note
To be able to view the performance counters, a user needs to be in the Performance Monitor Users group or an administrator.
Windows Reliability and
Performance Monitor will start with the Resource view display, which
enables you to monitor the usage and performance of the major system
subcomponents: processors, disks, network, and memory resources in real
time (see Figure 1). You can then click the Detail button to see which processes are using which resources.
Note
If Resource view does
not display real-time data when Windows Reliability and Performance
Monitor starts, click the green Start button in the toolbar.
Performance
Monitor provides a visual display of built-in Windows performance
counters, either in real time or as a way to review historical data (see
Figure 2).
You can add
performance counters to Performance Monitor by dragging and dropping, or
by creating custom DCSs. It features multiple graph views that enable
you to visually review performance log data. You can create custom views
in Performance Monitor that can be exported as DCSs for use with
performance and logging features.
Besides combing through
the Event Viewer, you can use the Reliability Monitor to give you an
overview of the system stability and to view individual events that
affect overall stability. Some of the events shown are software
installation, operating system updates, and hardware failures (see Figure 3).
Another tool that you can use to view system performance is the Windows Task Manager. The Performance tab includes four graphs (see Figure 4).
The top two graphs show how much CPU is being used, both at the moment,
and for the past few minutes. (If the CPU Usage History graph appears
split, your computer either has multiple CPUs, a single dual-core CPU,
or both.) A high percentage means that programs or processes are
requiring a lot of CPU resources, which can slow your computer. If the
percentage appears frozen at or near 100 percent, a program might not be
responding.
The bottom two
graphs display how much RAM, or physical memory, is being used in
megabytes (MB), both at the current moment and for the past few minutes.
The percentage of memory being used is listed at the bottom of the Task
Manager window. If memory use seems consistently high or slows your
computer’s performance noticeably, try reducing the number of programs
you have open at one time or install more RAM.
To get a list of all
individual processes or programs running in memory and how much
processor utilization and memory use each application is using, click
the Processes tab. You can also manually end any process here, which
comes in handy when a process stops responding (see Figure 5).
