Applications, application processes and services use operating system’s resources, creating the necessity for its around-the-clock high availability and performance.

Memory, disk space, processor performance or specific processing techniques like multi-threading, messaging, processor binding or queuing applications can only be available if sufficient operating system resources are permanently available.

Today, 32- and 64-bit systems and multi-processor architectures are available, allowing the simultaneous operation of several large applications.

The Windows operating system is divided into various levels and services. Applications are configured through a central registry. They use Windows resources like main memory, virtual memory, logical and physical disk space, processor performance, or specific processing techniques like multi-threading, messaging, processor binding or queuing.

Application tuning is often times directly interconnected with the tuning of the operating system. Overall performance and resource use can be improved through reconfiguration. There is even the possibility of reducing the number of application licenses, if for example licensing is dependent on the number of processors in use and if processor binding is possible (e.g. with the MS SQL Server).

The following services are monitored and many attributes of these services are analyzed in detail:

• processes (application processes in process groups)
• services
• work queues
• CPU (e.g. I/O of individual processors)
• memory (physical and virtual)
• hard drives (physical and logical)
• print spooler
• printer
• event log for application errors

In addition to this, various values and configurations for the operating system can be directly displayed in lists.

• availability and performance of the Windows system and the applications running on it
• allocation of information like process availability and performance with applications and respective service level analysis
• capacity planning and control of main memory, disk space and processors
• availability of Windows as a print server and of the connected printers
• usage measurement