Geoff White has created a badly needed tool here, Perfmon worked but was very time consuming.  Especially with those days or weeks of ESXTOP statistic files.

Extract and use the README.  For Windows, extract all files, navigate to the esxplot.exe in the Bin directory and you are off and running!

Geoff White now has a full project site with all information and releases.  Click here

Labs.vmware.com has now gone live and hosting ESXPlot as well.  Click 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.

Great document to keep handy, personally I use the Physical Disk counters often and refer to this document when doing so.

Read the document here.

*Update* Scott Drummonds of vPivot.com posted on ESXPlot, a great tool that is far more efficient and less aggravating than Perfmon for working with ESXTOP output files.  Sorry, I forgot to update this post for so long, I will be sure to create a new post just for this great new tool.