In version 2.0 of PowerShell, you can now use a direct command-let (get-Counter) to get at the Performance Monitor counters. For instance, to show the current value of the Processor Percent Time, use this command:  Get-Counter '\Processor(*)\% Processor Time'    The interesting part of get-Counter is that you can add a ...

It’s not hard to get Performance Monitor counters in PowerShell 1.0, and it’s REALLY easy in 2.0. This is one I used yesterday to monitor network bytes in and out on 2.0 (keep all of the green lines in this post on the same line) : get-counter -Counter "\Network Interface(*)\Bytes Total/sec" -SampleInterval 1 -MaxSamples ...

When you monitor for performance, you might start in the database server itself. But a true test really has more to do with the “round trip” of a data request from a client to a server and then the return of data back to the client. So I wired up this little test to simulate that process, and now I can run that from anywhere. The trick is the ...