Next we have Resource Monitor,
which looks like an expanded version of Task Manager,
if you're familiar with that, and it kind of is.
What you can see here across the top are a number of
tabs that first show a roll‑up,
an overview of the entire performance picture of the given machine.
And then you can drill into the four basic compute
subsystems in Windows Server: CPU, or processor; Memory,
that's going to be physical random access memory,
as well as logical memory, page file kind of stuff; that bleeds into Disk,
that's storage utilization and speed; and then we
have Network utilization and speed.
So in sum, you see that Resource Monitor is really a real‑time analysis.
If you have some performance issues in Windows Server,
you just want to get a quick EKG, so to speak, a quick live
picture of what's consuming on this machine, Resource Monitor is a
good tool to know about. Now you might be thinking, well, Tim,
what about the Sysinternals tools?
Those are for Microsoft. And while you're absolutely correct on that,
Sysinternals is not on the AZ‑800 or 801 objective domain, so I'm not going
to cover it, but you definitely should look at those tools. They're all free.
If you're not aware, there's several that are excellent for troubleshooting.
The Reliability Monitor, again, it's been around for a while.
It's part of the old‑fashioned Windows Control Panel, and I like
this because it gives you a wide picture of the historical
availability of your server system. And you can see that if
there's error or warning events,
they show right up very clearly on the graph, and then you
can look below and read in more detail what happened to
cause that failure or that warning.
You see that it's divided into app failures,
Windows failures, miscellaneous failures,
warnings, and then just information notifications.
This can tell you things that may not be entirely obvious.
Maybe there was a transient server reboot over last night, you see. You can
isolate exactly when that took place. If a service stopped,
you can find out when and details around that
situation. Reliability Monitor is fantastic.
The idea with all of these tools is ideally to have nothing left to the
imagination when you're troubleshooting a problem in Windows Server.
And I think you can see that our concern here isn't so
much things like security access,
it's mainly performance troubleshooting and performance optimization,
looking again at those four main subsystems: processor, memory, disk, and network.