Performance monitoring tool for Windows that's like collectl?

Question

I'm not well versed in the monitoring of performance when it comes to Windows (WinXP, Vista, Server 2k3 and above and now Win7). But I know Linux monitoring and I know that I really like collectl. In particular I like that:

1. By default it grabs everything it can on each monitor cycle. I don't find myself wishing I'd been collecting X all along, collectl just happened to be grabbing it all, all along.
2. I can have it export the data to my own aggregation tools using the output plugin architecture.

Add to that it's free.

Is there a comparable free product that can do the all-in type monitoring and data export for Windows? I'd even be okay writing my own data export if there's an all-in monitoring solution that can write the data to local disk.

Answer 1

I know very little about performance monitoring on windows other than by using perfmon. When I wrote collectl I actually did toy with the idea of seeing what I could do with windows and even played around with WMI - turns out you can connect to a windows box with WMI and retrieve the same data as you can with perfmon. The only thing is when I tried it the numbers I got were different than what perfmon reports. For example, there are a couple of CPU counters called %, but the numbers they report look nothing like percentages. I was able to get disk numbers and even some of network and memory.

The next thing I did was include collectl's formatit.ph file since that's where all the print routines live and by populating the right variables with WMI data I could then simply call the right routines and I could get data in any format collectl reports it in.=, including time stamps and space-separated data.

BUT as I said the data was not consistent or complete and it was really more of an exercise than anything else. However, if someone wants to write their own WMI data collection routines in perl and is looking to integrate them with the collectl print routines I can probably provide some consulting to help you take it to that next level. But the first step is getting the data.

-mark