Drilldown on summaries of recent activity on the Windows server.

How to open the Activity drilldown

From the Spotlight Client

  1. Select the connection from the left Connections pane.
  2. Click Monitor | Activity from the ribbon.
    Activity drilldown for Windows servers

About the Activity drilldown

Summary page

Investigate recent Windows activity.

Processor chart

Shows the percentage of Privileged and User Time.

High Privileged time means that the program is predominantly busy accessing resources through operating system requests.

High User time means that the program is predominantly CPU-bound with the program code itself.

Paging chart

Shows the rate at which pages are being swapped in and out of memory.

The Page ins value includes hard pages (paging requests that have to go to the paging file on disk) - not soft pages (requests for memory pages that are not in the program’s working set, but still in memory).

The Page outs value shows the number of pages written to the paging file on disk.

A sustained high rate of paging can cause problems with overall system degradation due to disk thrashing and CPU load.

Memory chart

Shows how much physical memory (RAM) and Virtual Memory Windows is using.

Physical Memory usage will normally remain close to the total amount of physical memory installed on the system unless the amount of physical memory you have exceeds the amount of virtual memory that Windows is using.

Windows normally keeps some physical memory available (free) for immediate reuse.

Virtual Memory usage increases and decreases as Windows processes requests and gives up memory and as processes are started and stopped.

A steady increase in Virtual memory usage can indicate that a process on the system has a memory leak.

Processor Queue Length chart

Shows the total number of threads (program execution units) that are waiting to be run on ALL processors. A sustained processor queue length greater than ten can indicate processor congestion.

To view Server Work Queues for the individual CPUs in the system, see the CPUs page. For more information, see Windows Server | CPU Drilldown.

Disk Queue Length chart

Shows the number of I/O requests that were queued for each logical disk.

Disk Queue Length indicates how heavily loaded a disk subsystem is. High queue lengths mean the disks are struggling to process the I/O load being put on them.

Network Packets chart

Shows the incoming and outgoing packet rates as an aggregate across all network cards in the system.

Custom Counters page

Investigate Custom Counters.

Custom Counters chart

Shows data collected for any Windows custom counters that have been configured.

The chart shows only those counters that return numeric values.

Custom Counters grid

Shows data collected for any Windows custom counters that have been configured.