Server Performance Advisor 3.0. We love it, we hate it, we didn’t want to watch the video on Channel9….
So the Dude was kind enough to blog about it. This is a tool, that is still sort of new, but can provide some valuable information into what is going on inside a a host that is an IIS or Hyper-V or Windows machine….
So without further adieu I give you SPA 3.0….
Well, actually, there is some adieu, because I need to show you how to properly install it yet…in my domain…named Peaches.
So, the idea here is as follows. To use SPA one must provide a host to collect and analyze data to. We have targets we want to collect performance information about, but we need a spot to throw it all. That host in my example is named 2008R2-MON.
You build it up, give it some space, some CPU, memory, network, get it on the domain, install .NET Framework 4.0, service pack it up and then install SQL 2008 Express Edition….as follows:
And then…
and then…
and then…
and then…
and then…
and then…
and then…
(assuming we’re just being boring and installing to C:, which is what I did…)
I switched to ‘Default Instance’ to make things easier on myself later on. In case they got difficult anyway. (they didn’t)…
and then…
(Yes, my domain name is ‘peaches’ in my test lab…)
(I gave myself SQL Admin rights, in production you should consult a quality DBA for this really)
I opted out of SQL Error Reporting and Feature Usage this time, but really you should opt in for production, that way when something is on the code chopping block, the PM can know to not chop the feature you always use…
Woot it passed..
and then…
and then…
It’s alive!
(I love that movie)
So, now that you have SQL installed, what about SPA 3.0? (this is a blog post about SPA 3.0 after all…)
Download SPA 3.0 from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/hh367834
Run it:
and then
and then
and then
Here we connect to SQL…
And we now are using these APs…
Create a share (I named mine ‘share’) and make sure you have rights to write to it, alright?
Pick your poison, er, AP for use, and how long to collect data…
Check the boxes and click “Run Analysis” at the bottom right.
Once data is gathered, the machine you are running this on will get busy with its bad self as it parses the data:
Results look like this…
Hope this helps you with your visits to the SPA…
Thanks for checking it out Brian! Perfmon you can envision as more of a trending engine, where as SPA is a surgical collection that has to be done in short increments due to size of the data collection.
Dude… awesome article, I didn't even know this existed. I'll have to load this up and check it out. Although, I am curious to know how this will augment PAL/Perfmon. Thanks for taking the time to share with the community!