Currently I am attending Tech-Ed North America 2011 in Atlanta. In one of the sessions held today by Mark Ghazai and Peter Meister a tool called Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) was mentioned. Unfortunately for me the session was too long and there was no time to discuss this tool. The tool can be downloaded at Codeplex, it is free and in my opinion a very easy way in getting an insight into the performance of your Hyper-V environment.


Project Description

Ever have a performance problem, but don’t know what performance counters to collect or how to analyze them? The PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs) tool is a powerful tool that reads in a performance monitor counter log and analyzes it using known thresholds.

Features

  • Thresholds files for most of the major Microsoft products such as IIS, MOSS, SQL Server, BizTalk, Exchange, and Active Directory.
  • An easy to use GUI interface which makes creating batch files for the PAL.ps1 script.
  • A GUI editor for creating or editing your own threshold files.
  • Creates an HTML based report for ease of copy/pasting into other applications.
  • Analyzes performance counter logs for thresholds using thresholds that change their critieria based on the computer’s role or hardware specs.

To use PAL

The PAL tool is primarily a PowerShell script that requires arguments/parameters passed to it in order to properly analyze performance monitor logs.

Requirements

Operating Systems:

Tested on Windows 7, but should run on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 R2.

Required Products (free and public):

  • PowerShell v2.0 or greater.
  • Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1
  • Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5