Assessing an application’s performance has – at least in the past – been more of an art than a science. Experts in this field are true wizards who choose their performance metrics in mysterious ways and by magic churn out reports which will make or break your reputation as a quality software developer.
Although many developers acknowledge the importance of building to pre-defined performance standards, very few actually perform the appropriate tests to verify that their software actually adheres to those standards. Most often this is due to a lack of understanding of performance metrics and how to analyze them.
For all those developers who want to measure and analyze the performance of their applications but just don’t know where to start: Take a look at the Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool. This tool reads in a performance monitor counter log and analyzes it using complex thresholds. The tool generates a report which graphically charts important performance counters and throws alerts when thresholds are exceeded. The generated report not only tells you whether thresholds are exceeded but it also explains why a specific threshold is important and which performance counters are involved in the analysis.
Generated reports come complete with illustrative charts
Alerts are highlighted in the report
The PAL tool comes complete with threshold files for all major Microsoft products such as IIS, MOSS, SQL Server, BizTalk, Exchange, and Active Directory. In addition it enables you to create your own threshold files to analyze any performance counter you want.
You can check out the tool on CodePlex:
http://www.codeplex.com/PAL