Weekly quickTIP
Bundle Those Logs with Relog
You're using Perfmon and now you've got logs up the you-know-what. Use the relog tool to tame them.
- By Greg Shields
- 05/24/2007
Last week, I stood on my soapbox about the need for everyone to enable at least a minimum set of performance counters on their servers. Have you done it yet?
One of the biggest problems with Perfmon in all of its no-costness is the separation of logs that occurs at every reboot. If you’ve enabled perfmon counters, you’ve found that every reboot stops the currently running log and starts a brand new log. This separation of logs makes it difficult to correlate counters across a long period of time when you do a historical analysis.
Need to combine those logs? The Windows native tool relog has the capability to do just that. Relog is mostly used to convert Perfmon counters from one type to another, like converting a binary log to a CSV-formatted one.
Using a little extra syntax, you can also use relog to recombine the counters that you separated out with every reboot of your monitored server. None of this is new, but it may not be terribly obvious how to do it correctly. Let’s say you have three counter logs you want to combine into a single log called allCounters.blg, use the following syntax:
Relog.exe {log1.blg} {log2.blg} {log3.blg} –o {allCounters.blg}
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Be aware that as the size of your logs grows, you’ll find it takes longer and longer for Perfmon to show the graph of those logs. If they do get too large to handle, you can use relog’s –b and –e switches to do the reverse and trim the logs down into a more manageable size.
About the Author
Greg Shields is Author Evangelist with PluralSight, and is a globally-recognized expert on systems management, virtualization, and cloud technologies. A multiple-year recipient of the Microsoft MVP, VMware vExpert, and Citrix CTP awards, Greg is a contributing editor for Redmond Magazine and Virtualization Review Magazine, and is a frequent speaker at IT conferences worldwide. Reach him on Twitter at @concentratedgreg.