Are there better clients for viewing System Monitor logs?

Question

Does anyone know of a better GUI client for displaying Windows System Monitor log files? (System Monitor is sometimes called Performance Monitor.) I'm trying to track a long-term memory leak in a C# application running on Windows XP or 2K3 by comparing memory usages to run logs.

Specifically I want a client that will allow me to see the following (because System Monitor is unable or difficult):

• Specify exact date time ranges for viewing data (or at least finer granularity than hours)
• Show time intervals along the horizontal axis
• Show max, min, average for the time range
• Somewhere show the interval on which source data was captured (1 sec, 5 min, etc.)

(If no such thing exists I'm willing to hear recommendations for better long term performance/memory capturing tools.)

Edit: I've done Google searches and haven't found anything except tutorials on how to create System Monitor logs.

Answer 1

One of the tricks that I have used in the past is to use performance/system monitor to log this data to a SQL database. SQL Expression can work great for this. Then you can generate reports using Reporting Services or for the more adventurous types you can do some cube analysis with Analysis Services. So while this does not solve the UI problem, it does allow you to make your own UI. When I had done this previously I just used a simple Reporting Services graph.

Answer 2

SCOM 2007 with reporting services actually does a pretty good job of this. If not the SQLh2 tool is almost as good and its free. You will probably have to customize the reports yourself though

Answer 3

See this question.

The PAL tool does a nice job of creating an HTML report with charts and graphs. By creating your own Threshold file you can control what goes into the report.

Answer 4

While I accepted Patrick Cuff's answer, for my needs I found a better way to graph the data: Excel

It still doesn't provide everything I need, but it is a marked improvement over the System Monitor GUI. I use the relog command line tool to convert the log into a CSV, and then import the CSV into Excel. Excel does not automatically handle the third one, but I can add new columns to graph, and it does allow me to have better control over which data I'm displaying.