Windows XP

There are many different services that may be running at any single time within a given operating system. These services are necessary in ensuring that the operating system functions are carried out as required but at the same time done in optimal manner. With system resources being limited, there is need to ensure that the available resources are well and that the critical resources are used in a proper and efficient manner. For this reason, operating systems do ship with service performance tools that are used by system administrators to monitor operating system service and perform intervention measures to correct any anomaly. Operating systems like windows Xp have inbuilt service performance monitoring tool that allows administrators acquire fine details about the running of various service at particular time. Such tools have being improved with the introduction of new operating system (Simmons, 2005).

Windows service performance monitoring tool

According to Shelly and Vermaat (2009), a performance monitor is a program available in an operating system whose use is to measure and report on the utilization of various system resources in the computer such as software and hardware. The use of performance monitoring tool in the management of service is useful in ensuring that the right services are running as required. In the windows operating system, tools such as the System Monitor is used to gather data about the various services and other resources and thus used for administering system resources.

These data are gathered by performance utility and written to the system registry and can be viewed by the performance tool. The role played by such performance tool in the monitoring of resources such as service is needful for the optimal running of the operating system. Microsoft has improved its performance monitor with the launch of Windows 7 operating system.

Windows 7 service performance monitoring tool

Microsoft Corporation has developed a number of operating system with Windows 7 being the lasts operating system and has gained worldwide acclamation by many. The success of this operating is hinged on the availability of numerous improvement done on the operating system component that include the performance monitoring tool that are made accessible for administration of computer running this particular operating system.  Windows 7 has an improved performance monitoring tool that is more improved that those found in its predecessors. This tool is available in any version of the windows 7 installation and can be accessed via the run command by keying perfmon.msc.

In windows 7, the performance monitor can be used for a variety of task such as the management of local or remote resources (Panek &Wentworth, 2010). This is a significant improvement over the other versions of the performance monitor tool and thus a critical milestone in monitoring of resources and services in the operating system.  The performance monitor in windows 7 is more improved with the ability to monitor performance of services through a real time mode or by viewing log file that contain fine data on various parameters of the system services.

The new implementation of the performance monitor allows the administrators to collect information of running services from a local computer or from a remote workstation in a simultaneous manner and thus useful in the monitoring and management of numerous workstations with limited staff or administrators at work. With the ability to create log file of performance statistics, this latest performance tool is indispensible tool especially in ensuring that monitoring can be done even in the absence of the administrators. This is useful when administrators are out of the office while computer systems are running or in use.

The new implementation of the performance monitor has a lot of flexibility that allows the system administrators to choose the type of information they need by selecting the appropriate variables or counters to probe when monitoring the service in the operating system. This is a novel feature that allows administrators to view the necessary information through isolating fields or counters that may not be necessary at any given time. This feature implies that administrators can now use other system resources such as disk space, RAM and CPU efficiently with little time being spent. This tool also allows the administrators to choose the preferred sampling procedure that allows the performance monitoring data to be gathered at particular time. This may be useful in monitoring the performance of service at specific instances such as during peak time.

Windows 7 performance monitor allows administrators to determine the output format for the performance monitoring data that may be suitable to the administrators.  The options available include output format such as graphs and tables. The tool also allows the administrators to determine the information that can be displayed to other remote performance monitoring tools from other computers.  With the tools reporting feature, it is useful in informing the administrators of areas that are not performing as required and possibly provide alternative to correct the problem. This is useful especially when performances of these services are compared against a known benchmark. These services can then be restarted, stopped on started with ease from the console.

Services usually run in operating systems in the background and useful for the execution of specific roles within the system and the availability of performance data is critical. This calls for use of improved performance monitoring tool such as one in Windows 7.