About the Windows Performance Monitor
The Performance Monitor organizes information by object, counter, and instance.
An object is a system resource category, such as a processor or physical disk. Properties of an object are counters. Counters for the object include , which is the default counter, and . Duplicate counters are handled by instances. For example, to monitor the of a specific CPU on a multiple CPU system, the object is selected. Then the counter for that object is selected, followed by the specific CPU instance for the counter.
In the Performance Monitor, you can view data in real-time format or collect the data in a log for future analysis. Specific components to evaluate include CPU load, memory use, and disk load.
Note:
You should use a remote host for monitoring of the test host to reduce any load that might otherwise skew results.