Looking for a process monitor that may not exist ...

[barney]

Folk,

Warning:  this may get a bit long.

I'm trying to find a process monitor that shows usages in near-real-time. 

It should show usage aggregates for 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes ...

Ideally 'twould show CPU activity, Disk I/O activity, RAM activity, GPU/graphics activity, traffic activity, maybe a few others, and log such as well as actively display.

Rationale.

Currently running Win7 RC (but have had similar problems with 2K/XP), and I'm running into periodic lockups.  Some are obviously CPU related, but others are not.  There tend to be three symptoms, although not always concurrent:  jerky, erratic cursor control; window/screen refresh issues;  hard disk i/o or network traffic issues.  I know - ? - that some of the lockups are GPU related, and suspect that some are read/write related.  (On the GPU side, I've enabled/disabled Aero, to no avail.)

There are a number of tools that will show real-time usage, but the changes tend to be too fast for these old eyes to record.  Back in the corporate world, a decade ago, there was a utility on a DEC LAN - VMS? - that would log activity history for CPU, disk i/o, & traffic.  I've yet to find any such tool for the current Windows world.  Thought I might find something cross-platform at FreshMeat, but, alas, that seems fated not to be.

So ... anyone have a reference to any such tool(s)?

[MilesAhead]

Nothing comes to mind other than the SysInternals suite.  You can download free from just about any download site, or from Microsoft downloads. I know I always see the updates on www.AfterDawn.com

Have you check for hardware i/o conflicts?  That's what it sounds like.

[f0dder]

With the video driver model Vista introduced (and win7 obviously continued), you shouldn't be getting BSODs from driver faults; the video driver runs in usermode and can just be restarted. (Hardware faults is a different matter, of course). From your description, my guess is you have flaky hardware... if you get BSOD-and-reboot (as opposed to really messy hardware faults), Windows should keep a minidump file which you can investigate to find out more about the issue - this is likely going to be a lot more valuable than the process monitor idea you've got.

[barney]

MilesAhead:  Yeah, SysInternals give me a lot of info ... it's just scattered out over multiple apps/utilities.

f0dder:  Maybe I made this sound more desperate as a situation than it is.  I do get BSODs, but that's from a known driver problem that has yet to be addressed by the vendor ... not a biggie.  The usual code is 0x00...0A, and I checked the dump(s) - that's how I isolated the driver issue - but just can't fix that until the vendor gets off their [collective] butt and addresses it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is more a pipe dream than a gotta fix it now.

I've been looking for such a thing, off and on, ever since I was exposed to the VAX/VMS logger.  There are utilities that do a lot of what I want, but they're all single-purpose, and damned few of 'em include logging over time.  Not looking for a magic bullet, but I would like to find something that would load the gun, so to speak.

What I'd like to find, if it exists, is a tool that will display/log conflicts averaged over a [specified] time span for most of the significant conflict areas.  Since I'm the go-to for a number of folk, I'd like something a bit more concrete than, "What did the message say?  I dunno, I just clicked the button to get it out of the way."  The event logs & system logs help, but a lot of preliminary stuff doesn't get logged, just the end result.  A system dump is all well and good, but it doesn't say whattranspired prior to the dump, just the machine state at the time of the dump.  I want tracks.

I've even considered using a key logger on a coupla folk, but that still wouldn't tell me what happened, and it's just a bit short of ethical <sigh />.

Just wishful thinkin' I guess.  (But as long as I'm wishin', be nice if this tool would run from a thumb drive, as well.)

[bgd77]

How you tried Windows 7 Resource and Performance Monitor? From what I know, you can make it monitor all the resource elements that you want and save all the data in a log (for this I think that it may be necessary to start it from command line, but i'm not sure about this). From what I know, Process Explorer from Sysinternals cannot save data in a log file.

Here are a few sites I found when searching it on google:

http://www.windows7u...ormance-Monitor.html
http://www.nirmaltv....ndows-7-performance/

[barney]

Yep.  It works well, but still runs in real-time.  (Haven't tried running it from command line, though.) 

For disk I/O, it provides a lot of data, including right now reads/second & writes/second, as well as average reads/writes for last minute and disk response time, all by process.

For CPU, it provides current usage by process as well as average usage over the last 60 seconds, amongst other things.

It has similar reporting for traffic & memory.

However, barring possible command-line usage, it does not provide a log, and it does not provide aggregation, except for per/minute or last 60 seconds.  If I can redirect its output to a log, I suppose I could cobble something together to extract and aggregate data, but that doesn't make it very useful as a take-along trouble-shooting tool.

Oh, yeah ... perfmon & resmon are pretty high on the list of resource usage - averages ~20% CPU on my box, and has been know to go as high as 40%.  That's a bit larger Heisenberg bite than I'd like <chortle />.

I'll check, though, to see if command line usage might allow logging.

[bgd77]

I think it may not be able to run from command line, probably it only works on XP.
But a useful think I discovered:

http://technet.micro...ibrary/cc749337.aspx

"A Data Collector Set can be created and then recorded individually, grouped with other Data Collector Set and incorporated into logs, viewed in Performance Monitor, configured to generate alerts when thresholds are reached, or used by other non-Microsoft applications. It can be associated with rules of scheduling for data collection at specific times."

[barney]

Yeah, bgd77,

I'd forgotten about the Data Collector Sets ... got excited when first I ran across 'em.  However, apart from being somewhat less than intuitive to set up [design], there's still the overhead involved with running perfmon/resmon ... a pretty big resource hit, and one that can lock/crash the system if you're running close to the edge on resources when the scheduled task loads.  Guess that's why I pushed it out of my mind ... lost too much work from that kind of crash.

Granted, the reporting is comprehensive, but the overhead just isn't worth the return in most cases - and portability pretty well falls by the wayside.

[bgd77]

Ok, I don't have any more ideas. 

Does anybody know a tool for this task? I know that for Linux there are a few good ones...