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A visit to the SPA

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Server Performance Advisor 3.0.  We love it, we hate it, we didn’t want to watch the video on Channel9….

So the Dude was kind enough to blog about it.  This is a tool, that is still sort of new, but can provide some valuable information into what is going on inside a a host that is an IIS or Hyper-V or Windows machine….

So without further adieu I give you SPA 3.0….

Well, actually, there is some adieu, because I need to show you how to properly install it yet…in my domain…named Peaches.

So, the idea here is as follows.  To use SPA one must provide a host to collect and analyze data to.  We have targets we want to collect performance information about, but we need a spot to throw it all.  That host in my example is named 2008R2-MON.

You build it up, give it some space, some CPU, memory, network, get it on the domain, install .NET Framework 4.0, service pack it up and then install SQL 2008 Express Edition….as follows:

sql1

And then…

 

sql2

and then…

sql3

and then…

sql4

and then…

sql5

and then…

sql6

and then…

sql7

and then…

sql8

(assuming we’re just being boring and installing to C:, which is what I did…)

sql9

I switched to ‘Default Instance’ to make things easier on myself later on.  In case they got difficult anyway.  (they didn’t)…

sql10

and then…

sql11

(Yes, my domain name is ‘peaches’ in my test lab…)

sql12

(I gave myself SQL Admin rights, in production you should consult a quality DBA for this really)

sql13

I opted out of SQL Error Reporting and Feature Usage this time, but really you should opt in for production, that way when something is on the code chopping block, the PM can know to not chop the feature you always use…

sql14

Woot it passed..

sql15

and then…

sql16

and then…

sql17

It’s alive!

image

(I love that movie)

So, now that you have SQL installed, what about SPA 3.0?  (this is a blog post about SPA 3.0 after all…)

Download SPA 3.0 from here:  https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/hh367834

Run it:

spa2

and then

spa3

and then

spa4

and then

spa5

Here we connect to SQL…

spa6

And we now are using these APs…

spa7

Create a share (I named mine ‘share’) and make sure you have rights to write to it, alright?

spa8

Pick your poison, er, AP for use, and how long to collect data…

spa9

Check the boxes and click “Run Analysis” at the bottom right.

spa10

spa11

Once data is gathered, the machine you are running this on will get busy with its bad self as it parses the data:

spa12

spa13

Results look like this…

spa14

spa15

Hope this helps you with your visits to the SPA…

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Thanks for checking it out Brian!  Perfmon you can envision as more of a trending engine, where as SPA is a surgical collection that has to be done in short increments due to size of the data collection.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Dude... awesome article, I didn't even know this existed.  I'll have to load this up and check it out.  Although, I am curious to know how this will augment PAL/Perfmon.  Thanks for taking the time to share with the community!