Windows Server 2003 : Monitoring Network Performance (part 1) - Using the Networking Tab in Task Manager

Using the Networking Tab in Task Manager

Sometimes, you just want to get quick information about what’s going on. If you wanted a phone number for a local pizzeria, you could look in the phone book and find the one you wanted, or you could get on the Internet and do a search for pizzerias within 5 miles, or you could ask a friend. Or you could simply dial 411 and get the information immediately. The operator usually even connects your call for another 50 cents. The beauty here is in the speed of getting what you want.

If your users report that a specific server is not responding to their requests appropriately, you should take immediate steps to diagnose the problem. The problem might be transient; that is, it might go away on its own. For instance, a 20-GB file might be transferring to or from the server, and hence, other requests might not be getting through. Other network performance problems are intermittent: they come and go with or without a pattern. These problems can occur after someone sets up a job to communicate with a server on a schedule or changes the normal routine to something abnormal.

But no matter what the problem is, you will probably want to resolve it right away. That’s what Windows Server 2003 Task Manager enables you to do.

Task Manager is a great tool for inspecting many areas of your server all at once. One area it can help you learn about your system is, in fact, networking performance. Although Task Manager might be less powerful than other tools , it is quite simple to access and can tell you a lot about the activities on your network.

To access Task Manager, you press Ctl+Alt+Del and click the Task Manager button. Then select the Networking tab, as shown in Figure 1.

The Networking tab provides an overview of the use on your network card. The scale on the left is the percentage used, and it automatically changes scale depending on how much the link is used. You can also determine other miscellaneous data—such as whether the link is operational or unplugged—by looking at the State column. And in the Link Speed column, you can see what speed the link is.

Choosing What to See Within the History

If you are receiving reports that the server is not responding fast enough to reads or writes, you might want to isolate the view of the network traffic. Indeed, you can choose to show and highlight the total traffic (the default) or choose to show and highlight the bytes sent or bytes received, as shown in Figure 2.

Filtering allows you to ignore the other “direction” of the network flow. That is, if you are troubleshooting a server that is not responding quickly to writes, you can temporarily ignore the bytes sent. Conversely, if you are troubleshooting a server that is not responding quickly to reads, you can temporarily ignore the bytes received.

Choosing Columns

As you saw in Figure 1, you can obtain an overview of some important state data, such as link speed. However, Network Monitor can also be a useful tool to determine which types of traffic are coming across the interface. Your view of what’s going on is greatly enhanced by means of a network counter: an exposed piece of information, sometimes called a data point, that you can access to see the current status. If you determine the value of an available data point over time, you are sampling the data.

You can choose to add more counters in the overview by opening the View menu and selecting Select Columns. Then you will expose all the available counters, as shown in Figure 3.

There are 26 counters for you to examine. However, not every counter will be important in your troubleshooting. Table 1 shows some of the most useful counters for troubleshooting network performance.