Track a program's memory & CPU usage with perfmon

JohnoBoy picture JohnoBoy · Oct 10, 2010 · Viewed 7.8k times · Source

I'm trying to track a process on system running Windows Vista, I tried creating a user Data Collection Set in Vista's "Reliability and Performance Monitor" (perfmon). What I did is the following:

  1. Under "Data Collector Sets" -> "User Defined" -> Right click and "New" -> "Data Collector Set"
  2. In the wizard I chose "Create Manually" -> Tick "Performance Counters" -> Click the "Add..." button
  3. Choose "Process" -> "% Processor Time" (Or any other counter for that matter), Choose my instance (for example, iexplore) and click "Add >>"
  4. Confirm the rest of the wizard and start the set

What happens is that the set runs and creates a log file, but when I stop it and try to open the file, none of the instance-specific counters show up, neither in the graph nor in the legend. If I add a counter with "_Total" as the instance I can get results. I've also tried adding all counters for a specific instance (\Process(iexplore)*), in that case I got results, but they we're for "_Total", not for the specified instance.

General info:
Windows Vista Business 32-Bit
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E6550 @ 2.33Ghz
2GB Ram

If this is the wrong place to ask this question I apologize and ask that you move it to the correct place

Thanks in advance

Answer

JohnoBoy picture JohnoBoy · Oct 25, 2010

This is a display error, counters are there but need to be re-added to the result file manually.