Is it possible to get an historical task list for the purpose of diagnosing a system issue?

Question

We had an issue with a 2019 server recently. Now, I can look at event logs, etc., but what I would like, especially in this case., is to find out what was going on at the time of the issue. My fantasy would be to be able to open the task manager and be able to scroll back in time to see what was running at the time and see what was swallowing up resources, CPU, Memory, Network, etc.
Perfmon just seems to be able to do snapshots, not to be always running, which is what I would like.. It would be nice if you could set it up to monitor the system with say, a rolling 24 hour log.
Do I need a 3rd party application or is there something native I'm missing?

Answer 1

Hello, If you need to get really specific, you can try Process Explorer from SysInternals. It will give you similar to what Task Manager gives you, but you can select processes and create on-the-fly graphs of their CPU usage by right clicking a process, selecting properties, and then the Performance Graph tab. Just like you said, perfmon and process explorer tool always used when the issue could be reproduced stably. they can generate a lot of data and might not be suitable for 24/7 logging. But as far as I know, it's possible to use commands to set the size of their logs and the time between crawls to do a loop of scraping.Best Regards, Hania Lian

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