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Applies to: ✔️ Windows VMs
Performance Diagnostics (PerfInsights) helps identify and troubleshoot performance issues on Azure virtual machines. This article describes how to access insights and reports generated by Performance Diagnostics and how to analyze the data.s
View insights
Performance Diagnostics insights lists a combination of the insights identified by continuous and on-demand diagnostics. The Impact for each insight indicates an impact level of High, Medium, or Low to indicate the potential for performance issues based on factors such as misconfiguration, known problems, or issues that are reported by other users. You might not yet be experiencing one or more of the listed issues. For example, you might have SQL log files and database files on the same data disk. This condition has a high potential for bottlenecks and other performance issues if the database usage is high. However, you might not notice an issue if the usage is low.
You can view this report from three different locations in the Azure portal, depending on your troubleshooting workflow. You can view the Performance Diagnostics reports from multiple locations in the Azure portal.
From the menu for the virtual machine. In the Help section of the menu, select Performance Diagnostics.
From the Overview page for the virtual machine. Select the Monitoring tab and then expand the Insights section.
From VM insights. Select Virtual machines from the Insights section of the Monitor menu and select the VM that you want to run diagnostics on. Select Insights and then the Performance tab.
Each of these methods displays the same data, although the Performance Diagnostics option provides the following additional features:
- Displays all insights in the selected time range. The other methods are limited to 300 rows.
- Ability to group insights by category, insight, or recommendation.
Click on the name of an insight to open the Performance diagnostics insights details context menu, which shows additional information, such as recommendations about what to do and links to relevant documentation. For an on-demand insight, you can also view or download the Performance Diagnostics report in the list by selecting View all insights or Download report, respectively.
View reports
The Performance Diagnostics reports tab is available only from the Performance diagnostics option for the VM. It lists all the on-demand diagnostics reports that were run. The list indicates the type of analysis that was run, insights that were found, and their impact levels.
Select a row to view more details.
Select the Download report button to download an HTML report that contains richer diagnostics information, such as storage and network configuration, performance counters, traces, list of processes, and logs. The content depends on the selected analysis. For advanced troubleshooting, the report might contain additional information and interactive charts that are related to high CPU usage, high disk usage, and processes that consume excessive memory.
Note
You can download Performance Diagnostics reports from the Performance Diagnostics screen within 30 days after you generate them. After 30 days, you might receive an error message. In this case, go to the storage account and download the report from the binary large object (BLOB) container named azdiagextnresults.
Review the diagnostics report
The PerformanceDiagnostics_yyyy-MM-dd_hh-mm-ss-fff.zip file contains the HTML report that details the findings of PerfInsights. To review the report, expand the PerformanceDiagnostics_yyyy-MM-dd_hh-mm-ss-fff.zip file, and then open PerfInsights Report.html.
Findings tab
Each finding is assigned one of the following categories:
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| High | Known issues that might cause performance issues. |
| Medium | Non-optimal configurations that do not necessarily cause performance issues. |
| Low | Informative statements only. |
Storage tab
The Disk Map and Volume Map sections describe how logical volumes and physical disks are related to each other.
In the physical disk perspective (Disk Map), the table shows all logical volumes that are running on the disk. In the following example, PhysicalDrive2 runs two logical volumes created on multiple partitions (J and H):
In the volume perspective (Volume Map), the tables show all the physical disks under each logical volume. Notice that for RAID/Dynamic disks, you might run a logical volume on multiple physical disks. In the following example, C:\mount is a mount point configured as SpannedDisk on physical disks 2 and 3:
SQL tab
The report will include a SQL tab if the target VM hosts any SQL Server instances.
The Findings tab contains a list of all the SQL related performance issues found, along with the recommendations. In the following example, PhysicalDrive0 (running the C drive) is displayed. This is because both the modeldev and modellog files are located on the C drive, and they are of different types (such as data file and transaction log, respectively).
The tabs for specific instances of SQL Server contain a general section that displays basic information about the selected instance. The tabs also contain more sections for advanced information, including settings, configurations, and user options.
Diagnostic tab
The Diagnostic tab contains information about top CPU, disk, and memory consumers on the computer during the Performance Diagnostics run. It also includes information about critical patches that the system might be missing, the task list, and important system events.
References to the external tools used
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
| Diskspd | Diskspd is a storage load generator and performance test tool from Microsoft. For more information, see Diskspd. |
| Xperf | Xperf is a command-line tool to capture traces from the Windows Performance Toolkit. For more information, see Windows Performance Toolkit – Xperf. |
Next steps
You can upload diagnostics logs and reports to Microsoft Support for further review. Support might request that you transmit the output that is generated by PerfInsights to assist with the troubleshooting process.
Contact us for help
If you have questions or need help, create a support request, or ask Azure community support. You can also submit product feedback to Azure feedback community.