Microsoft Support Diagnostic Packages

SCENARIO

You have a problem you are troubleshooting with a Windows server or desktop and you would like a tool to do an initial triage and data collection.

Install and Configure Windbg

In this post, I'll show you how to get, install, and configure windbg so that you can debug and or review dump files.

What you will need:
1. Debugging Tools: click here
2. Mex Extension: click here
3. Microsoft Symbols Server Info: click here

Using Perfmon to Analyze High CPU Usage.

Scenario

Your CPU utilization is maxing out and you want to find how what is responsible for the high CPU.  Sometimes the process is obvious in that you can look at task manager to see who is using the most CPU, but that alone doesn't give you a snapshot of what is happening on your server over a period of time.

To begin, use the instructions from this article to capture perfmon data while you are experiencing the high CPU state.  Let it capture a decent amount of time so that you can see trends.

After you capture the perfmon data, open it up by double clicking on the appropriate .blg file in the C:\Perflogs folder.  You should see something like the above image.  Unfortunately, this image isn't terribly helpful.  So we will need to remove all the counters and then start by adding counters systematically.