Joshua Townsend of VMToday just posted an article about ESXTOP and Windows Perfmon that included some of the lessons he learned when working with these tools.  I found it interesting as I had just posted some information on ESXTOP and how to use it with Perfmon.  You can find my document post here.

I absolutely agree with him that ESXTOP -a is useless with Perfmon, the output is very hard to work with and messy.  But I spent some time in the past building a few common counter lists that I use for performance troubleshooting.  Mostly, I find myself using the Physical Disk Latency counters most.  We use a Fiber Channel SAN so these counters are very useful for both myself and our SAN Administrators.

Read Joshua Townsend’s lessons here.