Windows comes with a facility for gathering system performance metrics. This is a good utility to gather data that can be used to identify performane bottlenecks or general hardware resource utilization.
However, the interface for Windows Performance Data Collector Sets is lacking an extremely vital feature: there seems to be no way to configure a data collector set to start automatically at windows boot up. Even though there is a Schedule tab in the Properties dialog of the data collector set. This schedule seems to be a one-time schedule.
This makes is less usable on systems that are not always on. For example workstations or laptops.
Making Windows Performance Data Collector Sets start up automatically
In order to make a performance data collector set start up automatically, we first need a way to start the data collector programmatically.
This can be done by starting
cmd
as Administrator and running:
logman start Perfmetrics\DataCollector01
Example:
C:\WINDOWS\system32>logman start Perfmetrics\DataCollector01
The command completed successfully.
C:\WINDOWS\system32>logman
Data Collector Set Type Status
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
perfmetrics Counter Running
The command completed successfully.
C:\WINDOWS\system32>
Save the command
logman start Perfmetrics\DataCollector01
to a batch file,
e.g. c:\scripts\start-perflog.bat.
Next, we need to ensure that the command is actually run on start up. There are several ways of doing that, but one way is to put an entry into Windows Registry.
To do this, open Redgistry Editor (regedit) and navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
Create a new String value with the following properties:
Name: Start-Perflogs
Type: REG_SZ
Data: c:\scripts\start-perflog.bat
Compatibility
I have tested this on Windows 10 Enterprise, but I would expect this to work on at least the following Windows versions:
- Windows 7
- Windows 10
- Windows 11
- Windows Server 2008
- Windows Server 2012
- Windows Server 2016
- Windows Server 2019
- Windows Server 2022