Alex
Have you looked in Help?
Performance Logs and Alerts overview
With Performance Logs and Alerts you can collect performance data
automatically from local or remote computers. You can view logged
counter data using System Monitor or export the data to spreadsheet
programs or databases for analysis and report generation. Performance
Logs and Alerts offers the following capabilities:
a.. Performance Logs and Alerts collects data in a comma-separated or
tab-separated format for easy import to spreadsheet programs. A binary
log-file format is also provided for circular logging or for logging
instances such as threads or processes that might begin after the log
starts collecting data. (Circular logging is the process of continuously
logging data to a single file, overwriting previous data with new data.)
b.. You can also collect data in an SQL database format. This option
defines the name of an existing SQL database and log set within the
database where the performance data will be read or written. This file
format is useful when collecting and analysing performance data at an
enterprise level rather than a per server basis.
c.. Counter data collected by Performance Logs and Alerts can be
viewed during collection as well as after collection has stopped.
d.. Because logging runs as a service, data collection occurs
regardless of whether any user is logged on to the computer being
monitored.
e.. You can define start and stop times, file names, file sizes, and
other parameters for automatic log generation.
f.. You can manage multiple logging sessions from a single console
window.
g.. You can set an alert on a counter, specifying that a message be
sent, a program be run, an entry be made to the application event log,
or a log be started when the selected counter's value exceeds or falls
below a specified setting.
Similar to System Monitor, Performance Logs and Alerts provides support
for defining performance objects, performance counters, and object
instances, and setting sampling intervals for monitoring data about
hardware resources and system services. Performance Logs and Alerts also
offers other options related to recording performance data. These
include:
a.. Start and stop logging either manually on demand, or automatically
based on a user-defined schedule.
b.. Configure additional settings for automatic logging, such as
automatic file renaming, and set parameters for stopping and starting a
log based on the elapsed time or the file size.
c.. Create trace logs. Using the default Windows XP system data
provider or another application provider, trace logs record detailed
system application events when certain activities such as a disk
input/output (I/O) operation or a page fault occurs. When the event
occurs, Windows XP logs the data to a file specified by the Performance
Logs and Alerts service. This differs from the operation of counter
logs; when counter logs are in use, the service obtains data from the
system when the update interval has elapsed, rather than waiting for a
specific event. A parsing tool is required to interpret the trace log
output. Developers can create such a tool using application programming
interfaces (APIs) provided on the MSDN Library Web site
(
http://msdn.microsoft.com/).
d.. You can also produce trace analysis reports from trace log output
files using the Tracerpt tool. Use this tool to process kernel, Active
Directory, and other transactional-based trace event logs, and to
generate trace analysis reports and a .csv files from binary logs.
e.. Define a program that runs when a log is stopped.
If you want to export log data to Microsoft Excel, the Performance Logs
and Alerts service must be stopped because Microsoft Excel requires
exclusive access to the log file. Other programs are not known to
require this exclusive access; therefore, in general you can work with
data from a log file while the service is collecting data to that file.
For more information about the Performance Logs and Alerts user
interface, see Performance Logs and Alerts interface.
--
Hope this helps.
Gerry
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