Showing category results for Performance and Diagnostics

Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA) is one of the most powerful tools available for understanding system performance on Windows. It helps engineers investigate Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) traces across CPU, memory, disk, networking, scheduling, input, and many other areas of the operating system. That power also comes with complexity. A singl...

If you’ve ever opened an ETL trace with hundreds of data tables and wondered “where do I even start?” This post is for you. We’re releasing an early preview of the ETW MCP, a Model Context Protocol server that lets GitHub Copilot, or any MCP-aware AI assistant, read, query, and reason over Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) traces the same way an expe...

We recently noticed that one of the dlls that we produce had suddenly jumped up in file size. The WinUI Controls library, Microsoft.UI.Xaml.Controls.dll that ships as part of Windows App SDK had ballooned in size in our internal builds. It had suddenly grown from 7 MB to 10.5 MB - approximately a 50% increase in size. What had happened to cause thi...

TL;DR New values in an existing ETW event aren’t supported, and a new version of the Windows Performance Toolkit (WPT) or the Microsoft.Windows.EventTracing.Processing.Toolkit NuGet library is needed to process traces with these events. About this failure We began to receive reports of WPA failing to process traces with this error code in late 2...

Performance Monitor Unit (PMU) events are used to measure CPU performance and understand workloads CPU characterization. Windows provides a way to collect PMU events through Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). When combined with other ETW events, we can tell a lot more concrete story about the performance. I recently added “Recording Hardware performa...

In Part 1, we discussed the different types of columns options available in WPA's table views and how those views can be configured. This blog will continue the series by digging into how to configure columns for different graph styles that can show numeric aggregations, time, and hierarchical data: Graphing Overview Before we ...

WPR supports configuring an autologger. Setting up the autologger and collecting the autologger trace is as easy as starting/stopping the trace. This article introduces how to start, stop, and cancel the autologger as well as export the autologger registry keys.

In the previous post, we discussed a brief intro into Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA) and its feature set.  WPA can display trace data in a wide array of formats, most of which are pre-configured as presets designed for drilling into specific data points. Here is one for example: WPA's CPU Usage (Sampled) table has a few different presets, ea...

In this post, we enhance the simple custom profile for WPR by adding the system tracing session. Because kernel events provide critical information about processes, threads, modules, and more, collecting the system events greatly extends your ability to analyze traces and diagnose issues.

This is the first post in a multi-part series about authoring custom profiles for Windows Performance Recorder (WPR.) In a previous post, we have looked at how to start a trace with built-in profiles. The built-in profiles offer wide variety of preset profiles that we can use for different scenarios. There are built-in profiles for CPU usage, Ne...