View Performance data in a web browser

This is a little trick, which I have been meaning to share for a while. It is a very simple way to view performance data for your server, using a web browser. Now I am sure that it’s not news to everyone, but for those of you who see this for the first time, I am sure you’ll be able to use this in your environment.

Because I work primarily with Exchange server, I will be using some Exchange performance data for this post. However, you can use any performance counters you require, according to my knowledge they all work the same way.

To setup a basic html page with some performance data, open performance monitor, and add a counter from a remote server. I my case I have selected the % Processor Time. Once the graph starts populating with data, right-click anywhere on the graph and select “Save As”. Save the html file, either to your web server, or anywhere on your disk.

If you open the file from the disk, you have to manually start the logging again, I have noticed that if the page is loaded from a web server this is not required.

Microsoft included a very nice performance template in the Exchange 2007 Toolbox. I think we’ll start there, and open a performance counter with some pre-loaded information. You can access the performance data from the Exchange Management Console. Click the Toolbox and select Performance Monitor.

You can now save this data to an html document as before. There is one catch though, the performance data saved from this console points to the local machine. You have to open the html document in a text editor, and do a find and replace on the following string VALUE="\ with VALUE="\\MACHINENAME\ where MACHINENAME is your server name.

Now you should be able to load this html document from any computer or web server and have the selected performance data available.