Microsoft Diagnostics Tools

Diagnostic tools pinpoint issues more efficiently.

Microsoft produces many products, including operating systems, games, development tools and office productivity suites. Some Microsoft diagnostic tools are included with the product and others are available for download. Diagnostic tools help identify security issues, performance issues and data not available in the base product. Use of these tools may be necessary to resolve issues that arise.

Security

The Microsoft Security Assessment Tool is a series of check lists to determine areas of concern for your organization. This tool covers the areas of people, infrastructure, operations and applications. Microsoft Baseline Security analyzer,or MBSA, scans computers with Microsoft operating systems and applications. MBSA returns a list of known vulnerabilities for the scanned computers. The reporting produced by this tool includes links and information to mitigate potential risks.

Sysinternals Suite

Sysinternals company was purchased by Microsoft in 2006 and continues to provide various free diagnostic tools. The Sysinternals Suite is available for download from Microsoft's website. This suite contains more than 60 diagnostic tools and utilities. These tools provide information regarding files, disks, processes and security. The diagnostic tool "Process Explorer" provides low-level details regarding executing processes in a Windows operating system. "PortMon" produces a display of the activity occurring with the ports on the machine. Determining what applications automatically start up in the Windows system are determined with the "Autoruns" utility included in the suite.

Performance Metrics

Windows operating systems provide a couple of tools that are useful for viewing performance data. "Task Manager" is an easy-to-use tool that supplies performance information about memory and CPU usage. Network performance, processor and memory usage data for the computer are also available. "Perfmon" is a more-detailed performance tool providing granular data, specific information regarding disk usage, memory, caching, network interfaces and the print queue. When attempting to resolve an application performance issue running on the Windows operating system, "Perfmon" is irreplaceable.

Tags: operating systems, Windows operating, available download, diagnostic tools, Diagnostic tools, information regarding, memory usage