In my previous blog post, I explained how to setup Performance Monitor (PerfMon) to proactively capture performance data while cleaning old files to keep disk space under control. This is, let’s say, our ideal scenario, but sometimes setup is not that specific and we need to deal with suboptimal files that contains the performance data we need to analyze:

• We have too many files
• We have too few files
• We have some huge file that makes analysis or processing it too slow
• We have files captured in different languages

Let’s have a brief description on how we can deal with some situations by introducing a couple of small but useful tools:

PAL – Performance Analysis of Logs

PAL is a small but really useful tool created by Clint Huffman that takes one perfmon counter file and creates a nice HTML report with graphs and descriptions that can be used as starting point for performance analysis. It’s not that the tool replaces a manual in-deep analysis of any potential problem, but it helps giving some tips that can be used to start looking for something else.

Read the full article at “Dynamics AX in the Field”, the blog from the Premier Field Engineering team at Microsoft.

Windows Performance Monitor (PerfMon) is likely the most useful tool (together with our DynamicsPerf package) to monitor and diagnose performance problems related with your Microsoft Dynamics AX infrastructure and, in general, for any software running on Windows operating systems. Given its importance, is surprising how many people is not using it properly or, even worst, is not using it at all.

I will briefly explain how to setup PerfMon to collect performance counters in all servers for continuous monitoring, creating log files per day, compressing and deleting old files to minimize disk space, along with some tips and tricks during the process:

Create and configure a Data Collector Set

• First of all open Performance Monitor either going to Administrative Tools in Windows Control Panel or searching “perfmon” in the Start menu.
• Navigate to Data Collector Sets > User Defined > Right Click > New > Data Collector Set.
• Choose “Create from a template” and finish the wizard. Some nice templates for all Dynamics AX server roles can be obtained as part of our DynamicsPerf download, under “DynamicsPerf 2.00\DynamicsPerf\Windows Perfmon Scripts” subfolder or as part of the PAL tool. We will talk about PAL on the next post on this series.

Read the full article at “Dynamics AX in the Field”, the blog from the Premier Field Engineering team at Microsoft.