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Adrian Grigore
Asked: 2013-01-04 14:46:08 +0800 CST

How can I log the most CPU-Intensive processes in regular intervals?

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I have a server which is idling below 5% cpu load most of the time, except from a few times a day where I can see some minor cpu spikes. I found out about this by using PRTG.

How can I find out what process is causing the cpu spikes? It's easy to monitor WMI CPU load with PRTG, but what I would also really need is a way to log the most CPU-Intensive processes in regular intervals.

I guess this can be done with perfmon, but which performance counters do I need for this job?

Thanks,

Adrian

windows-server-2008-r2

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Data Collector Sets are nice, professional, and they can be triggered by an event such as... high CPU usage.

    You could also use Powershell.

    $proc = Get-Process | Sort-Object TotalProcessorTime -Descending -EA 0 | Select -First 1
"$(Get-Date) - $($proc.Name) - $($proc.TotalProcessorTime)" | Out-File file.txt -Append

    Save that as a *.ps1. Run it as a Scheduled Task every 5 minutes or whatever. The first line finds the top 1 most "CPU intensive" process at the time. The second line logs it to a file with a time stamp.

    You could also get as fancy as you can imagine, by having the script only log if the system's total CPU usage is over 99% or something like that. The sky's the limit.

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