Showing Process ID Information in Performance Monitor

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In some situations while monitoring performance of a server, you may find a time when a particular process is restarting or crashing over time. By default, in Performance Monitor, you cannot view Process ID (PID) values to determine if a process was restarted for whatever reason. This is apparent for IIS Application pools as these processes could frequently crash/restart throughout the day. With each new restart of a process, a different PID is generated, so it would be nice if you could see this happening in Perfmon.

Luckily, there is a way to do just that to append the PID number for each process, so that if the PID should change, you can easily detect this in Performance Monitor.

To show ProcessID's along with process names, add the following registry entry on the server

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\PerfProc\Performance]

"ProcessNameFormat"=dword:00000002

This needs to be implemented on the machine in which the perfmon is being taken from. For more information regarding this registry setting, see 281884