I had a chance to speak to the Pacific IT Pros admin group meeting last night about diagnosing AD performance problems. I did the session over Live Meeting and the telephone, so it's difficult to say exactly how it all went. There were a lot of good questions, and I got a nice round of applause over the phone, so I guess it went ok. I did a demo of Server Performance Advisor also, and that went well too. Amazingly, almost 2 years after writing about SPA in Windows IT Pro magazine, only a couple of the 150 people present had ever used SPA.

One fellow asked if SPA would run on Windows 2000. I said yes, but I may be wrong about that, at least according to this KB article. I wonder if the issue is just not having the .Net 2.0 framework installed, or it its something deeper. SPA relies heavily on Event Tracing for Windows (ETW), and I know W2K AD was a ETW provider, so it should work. I'll to try it out.

There was another question about SPA providing Exchange performance information. The answer is no, not really. The Exchange store (in EXCH2003 and I presume in EXCH2007) provides ETW counters that you can collect with SPA, and there are a host of Exchange-related perf counters as well. And you can compose a new data colelctor in SPA easily. The tricky part is creating the report and rules, which requires some XML/XSL wrangling. In theory it should be doable, but in practice it will be hard, as there is nothing but a couple of samples to provide you guidance.

If you're an IT Pro-type person in the Northern California area, check out PacITPros. They host their meetings in San Francisco primarily, but the do live 'casts to other locations as well. They're very active, despite the relatively stale website. Check them out at www.pacitpros.org.