Command-Line Tools for Performance Logging
You might wonder how to use XP and Win2K's performance-logging capabilities from the command line. I don't know an easy way in Win2K without using resource kit tools, but XP provides a new tool called Logman that lets you start and stop logging sessions and create new logging sessions from the command line. (For a list of XP and Windows 2003 performance-management tools, including Logman, see the sidebar "New Performance-Management Tools.")
The first command that Listing 2 shows creates a new logging session called c:\perflogs\IISLogging.blg, adds the Process\% Processor Time counter for the inetinfo.exe process running on the local server, and sets the collection interval to 15 minutes. The second command starts the logging session. If you start the MMC Performance Monitor tool, you'll see this new logging session in the list of Counter logs.
You can use Logman's s option to start logging on a remote machine (e.g., s \\server1). In such a case, you're actually starting the Performance Logs and Alerts service and running logging on the remote server—not the server on which you ran logman.exe. You can also change the counter path in Listing 2 to \\server1\ Process(inetinfo)\% Processor Time to run logging remotely against server1 from the machine on which you set up logging.
WMIC
The Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) tool is new in Windows 2003 and XP. This tool provides a convenient approach for accessing WMI objects and their properties. (For information about WMIC and other new Windows 2003 and XP performance-management tools, see the sidebar "New Performance-Management Tools.") To start WMIC, go to a command prompt and enter
wmic
The first time you run WMIC, the tool installs itself into the WMI namespace. Although Microsoft intended for WMIC to make using WMI easier, the tool's syntax is quite cryptic. WMIC relies on aliases that represent WMI classes you might need to access frequently. For example, the WMIC alias pagefile is the equivalent of the WMI query Select * from Win32_PageFileUsage. So, if you enter
pagefile
at the WMIC prompt, the tool returns current page-file usage on the system. As you might know, Performance Monitor counters are available through WMI. Unfortunately, WMIC doesn't provide aliases to WMI-based Performance Monitor data. To work around this problem, you can directly call the relevant WMI classes for Performance Monitor counters. For example, if you want to determine the current physical memory utilization on a server, you can go to the WMIC command line and enter
path win32_perfformatteddata_perfos
_memory
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