Supporting Users and Troubleshooting a Windows® XP Operating System Exam Cram™ 2 (Exam 70-27)

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you are working on has Fast User Switching enabled, is a member of a work-

group, or is a standalone computer. The Users tab is unavailable on com-

puters that are members of a network domain.

For any other vital statistics on a system, or for more detailed and in-depth

inquiries, use the System Monitor and the Performance Logs and Alerts

tools, which are available as part of the Performance MMC snap-in.

Customizing Real-Time Monitoring with

System Monitor

As mentioned earlier, you can use the System Monitor to view the status of

many system components in real time and display them in any of three dif-

ferent views—graph, histogram, or report. The graph view is the default, and

it supports the most optional settings. The histogram view is a bar-chart con-

figuration. The report view is simply a list of the performance objects, coun-

ters, and their associated instances in a report-like format.

Using the System Monitor, you can display the local computer along with

several remote computers over a network connection all at the same time.

To modify the display properties of the system monitor, right-click the view

(the right pane of the Performance console) and choose Properties. You can

alter all properties of the System Monitor view, including the display color

of counters, the scale and sample rate, and the format of the monitor’s dis-

play—which can be in a graph, a histogram (bar chart), or a report (numeric

display) format.

Rather than just display real-time statistics, you can also choose to record the

system performance of the local or remote computers to a log file using the

Performance Logs and Alerts node of the Performance snap-in. To record

the values, see the section “Using Logged Monitoring with Performance

Logs and Alerts,” later in this chapter.

To obtain the most accurate results when monitoring a computer’s performance

with System Monitor, you should monitor a computer remotely. System Monitor

itself requires a certain amount of overhead to run. Therefore, when you run

System Monitor on the same machine you are measuring, the performance data

can be negatively affected and the results might be somewhat skewed.

Adding and Removing Objects, Counters, and Instances

System Monitor offers you a variety of ways to add objects, counters, and

instances to its list of monitored items; which we simply refer to collectively

as counters.

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To add counters, you can click the plus symbol (+) on the icon bar, you can

press Ctrl+I on the keyboard, or you can right-click the right (details) pane

in any view and select Add Counters. To both add and remove counters, you

can right-click the details pane in any view, select Properties, and click the

Data tab.

Any of these methods opens the Add Counters dialog box shown in

Figure 7.6.

Figure 7.6 Adding performance counters to System Monitor with the Add Counters dialog box.

To remove counters from System Monitor, you can select the counter that

you want to remove at the bottom of the details pane and press the Del key

on the keyboard.

Using Logged Monitoring with Performance Logs and Alerts

The Performance Logs and Alerts tool in Windows XP is the other half of

the Performance snap-in. Performance Logs and Alerts supports logged mon-

itoring to log files whose size is only limited by the maximum supported file

size for the file system on which the logs are stored. In addition, you can

append performance data onto existing log files.

The Performance Logs and Alerts tool offers you three major benefits:

➤ The ability to record system performance data at specified intervals over

time using counter logs

➤ A method to record detailed system events after specific events (triggers)

occur using trace logs