Save Performance Monitor settings

You can't observe what's happening without influencing the object being observed to some degree :-)

But the effect is minimal. Otherwise you'd have had a lot of people complaining about how useless performance monitor is when practically used in the field.

Edit: The more counters you use, the more overhead it does impose (as from this link). My experiences are that the overhead is usually negligible...if perfmon in normal use can kill your system, you're running on the edge of issues anyway.

My guess is that you are logging in one of the "Text File" formats. These cannot be used if you want dynamic activity (new processes, etc.) to be captured.

Instead, use the "Binary File" format to capture your data. This will allow perfmon to capture any dynamic activity for the counters that you assign.

Once you collection is completed, if you wish to open the log in Excel/etc., you can use the relog.exe program (included with Windows...) to convert the binary file into a text file. The syntax is:

relog.exe logfile.blg -f csv -o logfile.csv