New Performance-Management Tools

Several new Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP tools can help with your Windows performance-management tasks. The following list describes these tools and explains how you can use them.

Logman
Logman is a command-line tool for creating, editing, starting, and stopping Performance Monitor logging sessions and event-tracing sessions. Logman is a superset of the Microsoft Windows 2000 Server Resource Kit's Tracelog facilities. For more information about Logman, see the main article.

Performance Monitor's NT 4.0 Settings Import Feature
XP's version of Performance Monitor lets you convert Windows NT 4.0 Performance Monitor settings files to the HTML version that XP supports. Suppose you have an NT 4.0 log settings file called oldlog.pml that you want to use in Performance Monitor for XP. Go to a command prompt and enter

perfmon.exe oldlog.pml /htmlfile:newlog.htm

where newlog.htm is the old log settings file converted to HTML. You can then load this log settings file into the new version of Performance Monitor.

Relog
Relog is a utility that lets you convert Performance Monitor log files from one supported format to another. For example, suppose you created a binary log file but wanted to create a comma-delimited text file. You can run relog.exe to convert the binary file to a text file. You can also use Relog to filter counters out of the source log. So, you can run relog.exe to convert a binary log to text and include only processor utilization statistics from a specific server.

TraceRpt
TraceRpt is a command-line utility that lets you convert binary trace-session files into a text-based summary or detailed report files. Tracerpt.exe replaces the Win2K Server resource kit's tracedmp.exe.

TypePerf
XP includes TypePerf, which used to ship only as part of the Win2K Server resource kit. TypePerf lets you log Performance Monitor counters from the command line. You can log counters to a file or to the screen.

WMIC
The Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) tool lets you access WMI objects, methods, and properties, including WMI-based Performance Monitor counters. For more information about WMIC, see the main article.