When you don’t have any external performance and application monitoring tool for windows, perfmon is your best bet. This guide contains the steps/instructions to setup performance monitors a.k.a. perfmon data collector sets and it applies to windows XP, windows 2003 server, windows 2008 servers, Windows 7, Windows Server 2012 andWindows Vista. If you are using any other windows version, the process should still apply. Note that this guide assumes you don’t know anything about perfmon and you are starting from scratch. If you are already familiar about how to use it, stop right here! In my future posts, I will show you how to use the data, which you collect from these monitors, for diagnostic and troubleshooting common server, connection, performance and resource related issues. So lets get started.

Following are steps for Windows Vista®, Windows Server® 2008, Windows Server® 2012 and Windows® 7. These steps are fairly similar in case of Windows XP or Windows 2003 server.

• Create perfmon data collector set manually
• Create a template from an existing data collector set
• Create perfmon data collector set using an existing template
• Schedule perfmon to start/stop at specified time