The Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL)
tool is a free utility for analyzing PerfMon counter logs and creating
reports highlighting important areas by severity. The report
color-codes counters to display problem areas based on thresholds
defined by subject matter experts in the support teams at Microsoft.
It was written and is maintained by Clint
Huffman, a Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft, and supports most major
Microsoft server products. It reduces the amount of time required to
review and analyze PerfMon logs by automating this analysis, saving you
time by quickly highlighting potential problem areas requiring further
investigation.
Getting Started with PAL
PAL is available from Microsoft’s
open-source community project, CodePlex. PAL has been tested on
computers running Windows 7 × 64 and using the English-US locale. It
can run on x86 operating systems, but x64 is recommended when
processing large log files.
The tool was originally developed using VBScript,
COM, the Microsoft Log Parser tool, and the Microsoft Office 2003 Web
Components (OWC11). The latest version of PAL at the time of writing is
2.3.2; it has three prerequisites, each is free and publicly available:
- Windows PowerShell 2.0 or greater
- .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1
- Microsoft Chart Controls for .NET Framework 3.5
You can download PAL from http://pal.codeplex.com.
After you have downloaded and opened PAL, the
tabs located across the top of the utility act as steps in the wizard.
Navigating through each of these steps and populating the required
information is all that is necessary to process a PerfMon log. The
following steps will help get you started with PAL:
1. Once installed, launch PAL from the Start menu. The Welcome page will be displayed, as shown in Figure 1.
USING THE EXPORT FEATURE TO CREATE A LOG TEMPLATE
If you don’t have an existing PerfMon
log to analyze, consider exporting a threshold file to create a counter
log template. To do this, choose the Threshold File tab from the PAL
interface, select the SQL Server 2005/2008 template, and click the
Export to PerfMon Template File button. Export the template with an
.XML extension for use on Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 target
machines.
2. Select the Counter Log tab and browse to select the PerfMon log (see Figure 2).
3. Click Next or select the Threshold File option from the top menu bar (see Figure 3).
Select the required Threshold File from the drop-down selection box.
The current release doesn’t have a SQL Server 2012 template, so the SQL
Server 2005/2008 template will provide the closest match (these
templates can be configured/adapted as required).
4. On the
Questions tab there are five additional questions to answer. Responding
to these questions will provide output with thresholds tailored to the
server on which the PerfMon log was captured. Ensure that you count
logical processors, not physical sockets, when choosing the number of
CPUs.
5. Click Next
or choose the Analysis Interval menu item. Here you can control the
interval used by PAL to analyze the log files. Selecting All from the
drop-down box means PAL will analyze every data point in the log file
(this could be very many) and analysis will be lengthy. Leave this as
Auto unless you have a specific reason to change it.
6. Click Next
or choose the Output Options item from the menu bar. Here it’s possible
to control the output types and location. The default settings are
usually good unless something specific is required.
7. Move to the
Execute tab, where usually the default settings are adequate. Click
Finish to begin log analysis, which will launch the script (see Figure 4).
Once the PAL tool has finished, an MHT file will
be displayed in Internet Explorer containing the results. To get an
idea of what this process entails, a recent 254MB log file analyzed by
PAL on a quad-core computer took around 45minutes to analyze.
The report produced by PAL analyzes performance
metrics for the key hardware resources: Processor, Network, Disk,
Memory, and SQL Server. The report is color-coded to help you quickly
identify problem areas.
