I've been assigned the task of putting numbers to pretty much everything that happens at our sites. We need this to present to management so that we have quantifiable numbers for them to crunch.
OK thats the intro. Here's the meat of it. I need to be able to time things, how long the pc takes to boot, how long programs take to open, how long the pc takes to shut down. Then there's the bandwidth and latency measuring for the internet, local network usage, server benchmarking and usage analysis. You get the idea I hope.
Now I've managed to find 2 programs that measure system startup, one is by Microsoft themselves called bootvis (very cool), the other program is by planetsoft (boottimer) and gives you a reboot cycle time. What I need is something that will log EVERY boot, from as close to the bios until the last starup/msconfig program has run. That way we can analyze when and if users machines are slowing down, when this happens etc. Otherwise it becomes a subjective experience and pcs are NEVER fast enough for the user! So if we've got numbers then we have an objective comparision.
The next part is a program that does the same but for programs, it measures the and logs the length of time it takes to finish loading programs. Once again users complain that programs take forever to load, and we need to know how long forever is and is it different from yesterday.
Network can wait for a bit, but if you'ver got any suggestions I won't say no.
Finally server benchmarking. Sigh. where to start, something to measure load balancing between the various servers, but also something that can take perfmon (we're using 2003) and actually make it useful. Its all very well having all the numbers perfmon can throw at you, but if you've got to then process 6months of numbers to show to management and make it meaningful, I don't want the job! I've found a linux program called cactus that measures memory usage, it seems like an awesome product if the only thing that I wanted to measure was memory usage, is there something thats more feature full and measures other functions, is there something thats windows based?
OK I hope you guys can help me with this.
Thanks!
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