I think I have blogged on the Perfmon cube before, but I am blogging again since many people still do not appreciate how valuable and comprehensive the information from Perfmon can be. When you have a production performance issue, it is so much easier to diagnose if you can do so without adding further stress on the server and by looking at trend information. For example, if your server is busy and going slow, wouldn't it be good to see what cpu/memory/io metrics are now, and compare them to how they were before the performance issue? If you don't store historical information, trend analysis is not possible. And without historical information you will be less likely to preemptively act to avoid a performance problem.My dashboard http://EasternMining.com.au/sites/Demonstrations/Shared%20Documents/Windows%20Performance%20Monitor/Perfmon.aspx shows many perfmon metrics, but the dashboard conceals how rich the cube is. Notice the headline information in the dashboard above. Now let's assume that there might be an IO bottleneck (very common in database servers nowadays). Click on the Disk tab at the top of the dashboard. This will show you the Physical Disk counters from perfmon. You can filter it by a particular machine. Now click on Disk Bytes/sec in the main display table. Notice how the two graphs on the right dynamically chart this counter for the last 60 minutes and last 60 hours. 
We can see that there is a large amount of IO on the B: drive during the last couple of days. Now we want to know which program (windows process) is consuming this IO. Perfmon has all the information. Click on Process tab at the top of the dashboard. Then click on IO Data Bytes/sec in the main table. Notice how the graphs on the right chart the top processes of this counter. Also try clicking on IO Write Bytes/sec and see that most of the IO activity is write IO. The chart tells us which process is consuming the IO. In my case it is msmdsrv.exe but it might be different by the time you look at it. All this analysis can be performed without increasing load on the target servers.
We can see that there is a large amount of IO on the B: drive during the last couple of days. Now we want to know which program (windows process) is consuming this IO. Perfmon has all the information. Click on Process tab at the top of the dashboard. Then click on IO Data Bytes/sec in the main table. Notice how the graphs on the right chart the top processes of this counter. Also try clicking on IO Write Bytes/sec and see that most of the IO activity is write IO. The chart tells us which process is consuming the IO. In my case it is msmdsrv.exe but it might be different by the time you look at it. All this analysis can be performed without increasing load on the target servers.If you are interested in Windows performance, try clicking around the Perfmon dashboard tabs on my demonstration site above. The Perfmon metrics are very close to real time (<=180 second lag). You can also use ThinSlicer for ad hoc queries of the Perfmon cube from http://richardlees.com.au:8080/iislog/tsPerfmon.aspx?Column=[DateTime].[Year%20Month%20Day%20Hour]&Row=[Counters].[Counter%20Hierarchy]&Measure=Measures.[ValueAverage]
Also if you would like a Perfmon cube in your organisation, I would be happy to help you. The only technologies used to create the real time dashboard above is Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft PerformancePoint (PerformancePoint is optional for an application like this, since it is just the vehicle for displaying the information from the cube).
What I would really like to see is Microsoft providing this functionality out of the box.
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