How to add counters to Perfmon(Performance Monitor)

The Reliability and Performance Monitor introduced in Windows is a good built-in tool that lets you monitor and study how applications you run, affect your computer’s performance, both in real-time and by collecting log data for later analysis. In this post, we will see how to use Performance Monitor or Perfmon, as it is called, in Windows 10/8. The same of course applies to Windows 7/Vista too.

How to use Perfmon

Open the WinX menu in Windows 10 and select Run. Type perfmon.exe and hit Enter to open the Performance Monitor. In the left pane, select the User Defined node, right-click on it and select New > Data Collector Set.

Give a name to that and select Create manually (Advanced) to be able to set the parameters on your own.

Select the type of data you want to include. Click Next.

Click on Add and select the performance counters you would like to log. They could typically be a memory, processor usage, etc.

 Once adding the counters are complete, then click OK button.

Then selected counters will be displayed as shown in above screenshot.

 Next Select the Sample interval and the Units and click on Next button.

Now select the location where you want to save the data.

 How would you like to run the task? Leave it at Default – or use the Change button to select some other user. Click on Finish.

You will see the new entry in the right pane. Right-click on it and select Start.

you are done, right-click on it again and select Stop.

The data log file will be created and save in the specified location. Click on the file to view it in the Performance Monitor.

You will now be able to analyze the data for each of the counters.

While the task is running, you can always edit its properties by right-clicking on the Data Collector set in the left pane and selecting Properties.

Using Perfmon we can monitor the following counters.

1. Cpu level

-procesaor time , user time ,ideal time ,cpu interrupts

2. Memory level

- available bytes , commited bytes , page faults per sec , page faults write per sec and write per sec.

3. Disk level

- disc read time ,avg disk bytes read per sec ,avg disk bytes write per sec ,avg disk queue length and current disk queue length

4. System level

- processor queue length,context switching and threads

5. Network level

- no of connections established , connections failed , throughput,network delay

6. Server level

- requests per sec ,bytes per sec , ideal workers and active wirkers.

 Note: By default Perfmon extension is .blg to save the report as CSV format just change default to camma separate.