This is a special post, from the Microsoft Premier Field Engineers (PFE) Vital Signs Instructors alias…something we felt should be shared.
EDIT 2016: Note that Clint Huffman made a post to do this in logman in a black box recorder stype. I recommend following that too if you need the functionality: Clint's world, party time, excellent
If you had noticed, it’s difficult to sustain a data collector set in Perfmon for 2008 R2 through a reboot, so it automatically starts after the reboot. Well, here is how to make it work properly.
1. Define a User Defined Data Collector Set in Perfmon. You don’t have to define any schedule for it.
2. Go to Start -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Task Scheduler
3. Browse to Task Scheduler Library -> Microsoft -> Windows –> PLA
4. Enable Hidden Tasks (View -> Show Hidden Tasks)
5. You should see all your User Defined Data Collector Sets in here.
6. Open your set, go to Triggers and set up “At Startup“ trigger
Hope this helps you with your performance data collection needs!
Special shout out to Martin Vokurek in Prague for developing the details on this!
Rajneesh, which credentials, do you mean alternate credentials to do the data collector with?
Excellent blog, thanks.
Nice Description. But how i can setup these credential at installation time.
Hi – thanks so much for this info – found this article via Google – THANKS AGAIN!! 🙂
Brilliantly simple! Thanks Jeff!
Thanks much. Really saved my time.
What about for windows 2012 ?
Brilliant! Thanks
Simple and clear to folow
Thank you for posting this!
Thanks man!!!! It has solved the problems of many people 🙂 Appreciated!!!!!!
It only starts if the current log file is deleted, any way to make it start and continue with the existing log file?
Jeff,
thank you very much for sharing this important information. Your way how to describe each step is great and helped a lot. *thumbs up*
Greetings from Germany.
Is there a way to do this by using a script or a command-line operation?
Thanks, it was very useful! 😀
Excellent simple tutorial! Keep up the good work.
Wow! Thanks. It's so retarded that that isn't in the data collector set creation interface. It has an option to keep it running for a specific amount of time (like a week), but can't even restart after a reboot?! Damn that's stupid.
Concise and to the point! Excellent! Thanks!
Its very useful article.
Thanks for sharing. Very useful
I’m glad it helps someone out. Thanks for the feedback everyone.
Thanks a lot man
Welcome! Nice to see 5 years later its still helping folks 🙂
Hello Jeff,
I end up in this blog after trying to search around for the same questions. =)
Is still help ppl like me after 5 years.
Could I also trouble to check is there any command in the dos which I can get this setup without going through the GUI?
I trying to get similar setup via psexec for about close to 50 over servers.
I tried look at logman and schtasks with no avail.
Regards,
Richie
Hey Richie thanks! 🙂
Clint Huffman covers this some in the blog post here:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/clinth/archive/2014/05/23/how-to-create-a-blackbox-performance-counter-data-collector.aspx
Also if you haven’t looked, check out http://pal.codeplex.com, he has some sample scripts to automate data collection in there somewhere.
If I wanted to use this as a way to track performance on PCs in a domain environment. What would be the best way to push it out to the machines with group policy and how would I make sure that if the computer was rebooted it would start tracking again.
Sorry for some reason I’m not getting blog post alerts. You generally don’t want perfmon datacollectors for domain joined clients, you might want to check some of these talks on image validation and perf analysis:
https://docs.com/jeff-stokes/7309/jeffs-presentations
does it work on windos 10???