MADPASS 2019 May 15 - perfmon black box & AMA

Nothing to see here yet :-)

This is a place holder for a follow-up blog post to tonight's 5 minute intro to the value of a locally run perfmon black box, followed by the AMA panel with myself, Joe Obbish, and John Eisbrener.

Once there's something of interest here I'll tweet the link to give it a proper introduction.

Windows groups Performance Monitor Users and Performance Log Users.
Error message when you try to access the Performance Monitor (Perfmon.exe) on a remote computer: "Access Is Denied"
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/969639/


How to create a “black box” performance counter data collector
(Clint Huffman, 2014 May 23)
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/clinth/2014/05/23/how-to-create-a-black-box-performance-counter-data-collector/

My m.o. is to use a counters file. I typically keep the counters file in the same directory as my perfmon start script(s).

For example this text file lives at C:\perfmon\blackbox__counters.txt.

Note the final two lines - date and my name.  Because they don't match to legit counters these lines are ignored; i use this for commenting in my counters files.

\NUMA Node Memory(*)\Free & Zero Page List MBytes
\Paging File(_Total)\% Usage
\Memory\Pages Input/sec
\Memory\Pages Output/sec
\Network Interface(*)\Bytes Received/sec 
\Network Interface(*)\Bytes Sent/sec
\Processor Information(*,_Total)\% Processor Time
\LogicalDisk(*)\Current Disk Queue Length
\20190515
\Lonny Niederstadt -- Blackbox

The start script can be run interactively("Run as administrator"), but I also enjoy setting them to run on system start with schtasks.  It lives at C:\perfmon\blackbox__start.bat

:: local perfmon blackbox Lonny Niederstadt 20190515
setlocal enableextensions
cd /d "%~dp0"
logman.exe stop blackbox_%COMPUTERNAME%
logman.exe delete blackbox_%COMPUTERNAME%
logman.exe create counter blackbox_%COMPUTERNAME% -f csv -v mmddhhmm -max 500 -cf blackbox__counters.txt -o "C:\perfmon\blackbox_%computername%" -si 00:00:30 -cnf 24:00:00 -rf 672:00:00
logman.exe start blackbox_%COMPUTERNAME%
::pause

The real magic is in the "logman create counter" command.
logman create counter
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/logman-create-counter 

Additional resources:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Ask-The-Performance-Team/Two-Minute-Drill-LOGMAN-EXE/ba-p/373061