Windows 8 and Server 2012 now Generally Available
OK, now that all the hoopla of introducing Windows 8 is over, we can now get down to business. As I wrote in another entry, we at Demand Technology Software, have revised our software installation to work with both Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. As part of the revision, we have updated our Master Collection Set with new performance objects that Microsoft introduced with this new version of Windows.
I’ll simply mention the most interesting performance objects here. Mark Friedman has already given his first impression of the new operating system, but he plans to do some further investigation into these new objects and counters and discuss them in his performance blog.
Private Cloud Performance Objects
Of course, with Server 2012 improving on virtualization and the notion of building your own private cloud, there are quite a few new performance counters in the existing Hyper-V objects as well as some new performance objects, like ‘Hyper-V Virtual Switch Processor’ and ‘Hyper-V VM Save, Snapshot, and Restore’.
New Memory Performance Object
Along with some new counters in the Memory Performance Object, Microsoft introduced a new performance object called ‘NUMA Node Memory’. This object contains performance counters to report approximate memory utilization metrics by node in a NUMA system.
Network and File Sharing Performance Objects
There are quite a few new performance objects related to network and file sharing including the new ‘Network Adapter’ object which has the same counters as the ‘Network Interface’ object. However, the Network Adapter object includes virtual adapter instances, as well as physical adapter instances. It is nice that Microsoft kept the original object, while providing support for virtual instances in a new object. Speaking of virtual adapters, there is also a new object called ‘Network Virtualization’ which according to the explain text for the object “monitors the network activity matching network virtualization policies.” There is also a new ‘Physical Network Interface Card Activity’ performance object which “measures events on a physical network card”. This object essentially measures the physical state of the card, whereas the ‘Network Interface’ and ‘Network Adapter’ objects measure the activity (network traffic) on the card.
In support of the SMB (Server Manage Block) file sharing system (Samba software uses this protocol), there are three new objects beginning with ‘SMB’ on the server side and one object on the client side.
Finally, there are objects beginning with ‘WinNAT’ and contain performance counters for Network Address Translated packets for the ICMP, TCP, and UDP protocols.
Collect the new Performance Objects with Performance Sentry
Of course, if you want to collect these Windows performance metrics in cost effective and resource efficient way, you’ll want to use Performance Sentry from Demand Technology Software!
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