Creating and using PLA data collector sets

In the previous two recipes, you retrieved individual counter objects either by using Get-Counter or via WMI. That works, but retrieving performance data is slow. It took over a minute and 40 seconds to retrieve the performance counters in a local machine's Memory counter set. Using these methods for large-scale performance data collection does not scale well.

The PLA subsystem provides an efficient mechanism to perform the data collection. PLA allows you to create a data collector set. This is an object representing the counters whose values you wish to collect. Once you create the data collector set, you can direct Windows to start collecting the data and to output it for later analysis. You have options as to how to output the data—you can use a binary log file, a comma-delimited file, and more. Once you have the data collected and output, you can analyze it, as you can see in the Reporting on performance data recipe.

There is no direct...