I just got back from TechMentor where I again found myself spending a lot of time educating Windows administrators on the basics of performance management. There's been a problem with Windows administration over the past few years in that the needs of software hasn't kept up with the abilities of hardware. The end result is that we administrators find ourselves for the first time in the history of computing with vast supplies of resources and little demand.

Becuase of this, a generation of Windows administrators hasn't grown up needing to undertake the daily basics of performance management on servers. The basic concepts of performance management have gotten lost as the old guard moves on and the new guard takes over. What changes all of this, however, is the implementation of virtualization into the IT environment. WIth virtualization, your servers at 3% utilization find themselves "squished together" with others on a virtual host. For this architecture to work successfully, we now see a rebirth of the need for vigilance in watching and actioning on performance.

CC Hameed over at the Ask the Performance Team blog presents a comprehensive look at the command line tool LOGMAN.EXE. This tool provides a command-line approach to managing PerfMon that enables greater functionality, script and scheduled task-based exposure, and a better ability to manage performance logs.

Check out his LOGMAN Two Minute drill at this site: http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2008/05/13/two-minute-drill-logman-exe.aspx