Server Performance Advisor

There’s an interesting Microsoft tool called the Server Performance Advisor (SPA) v1.0 available at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=61a41d78-e4aa-47b9-901b-cf85da075a73&displaylang=en.

The SPA is a performance diagnostic tool for snooping out performance bottlenecks on Windows Server 2003.  It doesn’t work on Windows XP or Windows Server 2000.  The tool is especially geared towards problems in IIS 6.0 and Active Directory.  However, it is also a useful general performance measurement tool that tracks a variety of other areas of system utilization such as hot files, top TCP clients, top CPU consumers, print spooling, and context switching data.  It also tracks preliminary File Server trace data.

I haven’t had a chance to play with it much, but I’d like to hear your thoughts and impressions of the tool, especially whether you think it offers any value over other native tools like PerfMon.  

Thanks!

-Kevin