How can I send an alert on CPU usage in Windows Server 2008

Question

I am running Windows Server 2008 and frequently there is a single process that spikes the CPU usage to 25% or more and causes a lot of slow down issues. The server is being used remotely by approx 30 users and if I don't spot this problem quick enough it gets very frustrating for them when working.

Is there a way to automatically monitor and report if this process becomes over active and causes problems? The actual process is an exe file that runs as part of a Web Application for PDA remote users.

Solution 1

You can use Windows Performance Monitor to monitor the CPU usage on the server. You can then configure an alert for when it reaches a certain threshold. This article gives a good description of setting this up.

The Alert will let you either log this to the event log, send a netsend message, or more useful, run a program. You can then configure this to run a script or batch file that will send an email, or pager, or your favourite notification method.

Solution 2

25% isn't a lot. Assuming that meter goes to 100% then for every 4 seconds of wall time, your cpu is idle for 3 of them.

I would look more deeply into the main processes on that machine, I would suspect there is contention for a resource other than CPU, most likely disk IO, or network bandwidth, possibly even resources from another machine that service that process.

Comments

[Michael Hinds]

The link to windowsnetworking.com above is redirecting in a loop. The (now quite old) article can now be found at techgenix.com/windows_2003_performance_monitor

[PreguntonCojoneroCabrón]

using Performance Monitor degrade performance server ?