Feedback for Windows Performance Analyzer...

Question

First, I have to say that I really appreciate using Windows Performance Analyzer...it is a great tool.

We create a lot of our own custom events for different projects, and sometimes I wish that we could have a row with a special view for those custom events in the WPA analyzer.  This new row would have its own unique representation on the screen, but still lining up time-wise with the rest of the rows of information.

For example, we might want two events to be visually represented by a bar, where the bar starts on one event and ends on another event (like the process life row does); or we may want to put different events on different levels (i.e., like a data-level and a control-level).  Doing this would make looking at these custom events much easier.

Currently, we create different providers so that we can view the different events on different levels in the Generic Events row, which works somewhat; but it prolifierates the number of providers we have to create, and in some instances we would like the representation to be customized in a different way.

My question is, has there been any thought to creating a plug-in architecture and associated SDK for WPA that allows developers to write their own customized views for their own events?  I have thought about writing a viewer for our own events, but that means we miss out on seeing this view next to the other great WPA information and the great features of WPA (unless we duplicate it all in our custom viewer).

Just thought I would provide a bit of feedback to help make this great tool even better.  Thanks!

.Dan

Answer 1

Have you been able to get WPA to do anything beyond showing generic events diamonds on a graph for all custom events and providers? I'm not looking for custom graph types, just a simple graphing of an integer value reported with each event. If yes, can you share how it's done?

Answer 2

No, it is not possible to get more than the generic event diamonds today.  That is exactly the kind of thing that I would like to do.  Currently, we have to export the data and graph it separately, outside of xperf.

I think it would be very powerful to be able to create your own xperf add-ins that present custom views of your custom events, along side the standard information in Xperf.  I'm hoping that MS is listening and may do something to allow this in the future.

.Dan

Answer 3

If you haven't started worshiping bruce dawson ( http://randomascii.wordpress.com/category/xperf/ )  start doing it. More I say about him less I will fall short of words. He has amazing blog post and articles along what you have asked for(custom events and providers which he has provided on the website)