Windows – How to see disk usage graph on Windows Server 2012

hard driveperformance-monitoringwindows

I experience a huge slow-down on server. And the more I inspect, the less I find out what's going on wrong there.

I think it might be related to I/O. On local PC, I can open Task Manager, and see the disk usage:

enter image description here

However, on server I can't find a (preferably easy) way to see how much is disk in usage and if it's become the bottleneck or not.

enter image description here

How do you see disk usage on Windows Server 2012?

Best Answer

By default Windows hide the entry because of a noted significant performance impact in collecting Disk metrics on a Server:

enter image description here

You need to register the Disk Perfcounter before you see this entry.

  1. close Taskmanager
  2. open a cmd.exe as admin
  3. run diskperf -Y
  4. close cmd.exe and run Taskmgr

Now you see the entry:

enter image description here

To analyze disk activity deeper, install the WPT, run this xperf command and capture 1 minute of the activity:

xperf -on PROC_THREAD+LOADER+CSWITCH+DISPATCHER+DISK_IO+DISK_IO_INIT+FILENAME+FILE_IO+FILE_IO_INIT+PROFILE -stackwalk CSwitch+ReadyThread+FileCreate+FileCleanup+FileClose+FileRead+FileWrite+FileSetInformation+FileDelete+FileRename+DiskReadInit+DiskWriteInit+DiskFlushInit+Profile -buffersize 2048 -MaxFile 2048 -FileMode Circular && timeout -1 && xperf -d C:\diagDISKFILEIO.etl

and analyze the trace file in WPA.exe for DiskIO and FileIO.

Related Topic