Laerte Junior has previously helped me personally to resolve the issue with Powershell installation on my computer. He did awesome job to help. He has send this another wonderful article regarding performance counter for readers of this blog. I really liked it and I expect all of you who are Powershell geeks, you will like the same as well.

As a good DBA, you know that our social life is restricted to a few movies over the year and, when possible, a pizza in a restaurant next to your company’s place, of course.

So what we have to do is to create methods through which we can facilitate our daily processes to go home early, and eventually have a nice time with our family (and not sleeping on the couch).

As a consultant or fixed employee, one of our daily tasks is to monitor performance counters using Perfmom. To be honest, IDE is getting more complicated. To deal with this, I thought a solution using Powershell. Yes, with some lines of Powershell, you can configure which counters to use. And with one more line, you can already start collecting data. Let’s see one scenario:

You are a consultant who has several clients and has just closed another project in troubleshooting an SQL Server environment.

You are to use Perfmom to collect data from the server and you already have its XML configuration files made with the counters that you will be using- a file for memory bottleneck f, one for CPU, etc.

With one Powershell command line for each XML file, you start collecting. The output of such a TXT file collection is set to up in an SQL Server. With two lines of command for each XML, you make the whole process of data collection.

Creating an XML configuration File to Memory Counters:

Get-PerfCounterCategory -CategoryName "Memory" | Get-PerfCounterInstance  | Get-PerfCounterCounters |Save-ConfigPerfCounter -PathConfigFile "c:\temp\ConfigfileMemory.xml" -newfile

Creating an XML Configuration File to Buffer Manager, counters Page lookups/sec, Page reads/sec, Page writes/sec, Page life expectancy:

Get-PerfCounterCategory -CategoryName "SQLServer:Buffer Manager" | Get-PerfCounterInstance | Get-PerfCounterCounters -CounterName "Page*" | Save-ConfigPerfCounter -PathConfigFile "c:\temp\BufferManager.xml" –NewFile

Then you start the collection:

Set-CollectPerfCounter -DateTimeStart "05/24/2010 08:00:00" -DateTimeEnd "05/24/2010 22:00:00" -Interval 10 -PathConfigFile c:\temp\ConfigfileMemory.xml -PathOutputFile c:\temp\ConfigfileMemory.txt

To let the Buffer Manager collect, you need one more counters, including the Buffer cache hit ratio.

Just add a new counter to BufferManager.xml, omitting the new file parameter

Get-PerfCounterCategory -CategoryName "SQLServer:Buffer Manager" | Get-PerfCounterInstance | Get-PerfCounterCounters -CounterName "Buffer cache hit ratio" | Save-ConfigPerfCounter -PathConfigFile "c:\temp\BufferManager.xml"

And start the collection:

Set-CollectPerfCounter -DateTimeStart "05/24/2010 08:00:00" -DateTimeEnd "05/24/2010 22:00:00" -Interval 10 -PathConfigFile c:\temp\BufferManager.xml -PathOutputFile c:\temp\BufferManager.txt

You do not know which counters are in the Category Buffer Manager? Simple!

Get-PerfCounterCategory -CategoryName "SQLServer:Buffer Manager" | Get-PerfCounterInstance | Get-PerfCounterCounters

Let’s see one output file as shown below. It is ready to bulk insert into the SQL Server.

As you can see, Powershell makes this process incredibly easy and fast. Do you want to see more examples? Visit my blog at Shell Your Experience

You can find more about Laerte Junior over here:

• www.laertejuniordba.spaces.live.com
• www.simple-talk.com/author/laerte-junior
• www.twitter.com/laertejuniordba
• SQL Server Powershell Extension Team: http://sqlpsx.codeplex.com/

Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)