This statement tells WMIC to return the data held in the WMI class win32_perfformatteddata_perfos_memory. Figure 4 shows part of the command's output. The complete output would include every property associated with the WMI memory object you called. To see only the Available Bytes property, change the command to
path win32_perfformatteddata_perfos_
memory get AvailableBytes
You can also call WMIC from the command line, rather than interactively. For example, to view the Available Bytes metric, go to the command line and enter
wmic path win32_perfformatteddata_
perfos_memory get AvailableBytes
If you want to return multiple properties, you can simply use a comma to append them (e.g., AvailableBytes,AvailableMBytes,CacheBytes).
You might wonder how to obtain the WMI class names for all the supported Performance Monitor counters. The best method I've found is to download Microsoft's WMI Tools (http://msdn.microsoft.com/code/sample.asp?url=/msdn-files/027/001/566/msdncompositedoc.xml&frame=true) and use the WMI Object Browser tool to view all the classes under Win32_PerfformattedData.
A Word About Trace Logs
Event tracing is a low-level, extensible Windows mechanism for giving you detailed information about the subsystems you're monitoring. Microsoft ships several event-trace providers in the box that relate to metrics such as kernel performance and file-system activity. Windows 2003's version of event tracing also includes a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) provider that lets you trace every LDAP call that enters and exits an Active Directory (AD) server. Event tracing is extensible because application developers can use it as a logging mechanism for tracing events or transactions within their applications. The resulting data can be valuable if you're trying to discover performance bottlenecks in a multi-tiered application environment. Event tracing is currently an untapped Win2K feature—I suspect that Microsoft will put a lot of work into leveraging this facility to provide better and more detailed performance metrics in future Windows applications.
In the meantime, you can use XP and Win2K's existing tools to build a reasonably capable performance-management system for your Windows infrastructure. XP and Win2K's new logging features provide good unattended performance management. Although you can't scale these logging tools to numerous servers, you can use the tools to monitor your most crucial machines.
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