The reliability monitor is a very useful feature of Windows that helps in troubleshooting. It can easily help you understand the cause of poor performance of your system. It is an in-built tool and is often overlooked by users and admins as it is a hidden feature. To use the information provided by the reliability monitor you should understand it well. Let’s see how to use the reliability monitor information to troubleshoot your system.
Launching Reliability Monitor
- Open settings and search for ‘view reliability history’.
2. Once you open the reliability monitor you can see a graph that shows the stability index.
By using the ‘view by’ button you can view the results by days or weeks. The left and right arrows can be used to scroll and view the results of different days.
Now let’s see how to troubleshoot your system’s performance using this results.
Troubleshooting with Reliability Monitor
The graph shows the stability index which may range from 1-10. 10 represents very good performance without any troubles.As the performance degenerates the stability index also comes down. a very low stability index indicates very poor performance.
The different kinds of problems that will be analyzed by the reliability monitor are:
- Application failures
- Windows failures
- Miscellaneous failures
But in the console it reports the different problems with details under three categories . They are:
*Critical : These problems are usually marked with a red cross symbol and depicts any serious mishaps that might have occurred like some application failure,windows failure etc.
*Warnings: These may not be serious problems affecting performance but some warnings to prevent problems. They have a yellow exclamation warning flag.
*Informational messages : They will be marked with a lower case ‘i’ in a blue circle.
Along with listing the problems there will be actions to check for solutions to solve them.
If you want to know more details about a problem then you can just double click on the problem to view the problem summary.For example from the above image if you want to know more about the problem listed as “System Broker stopped working”, just double click on it. The summary will be displayed as shown below which includes all the relevant details of the problem.
Reliability Monitor stores the reliability history in its own internal file format. The “Save reliability history…” button at the lower left in the console window can be used to save a snapshot of that data at any time in XML format.This saves the hourly values for stability index in a more human readable form as shown below.
By analyzing the results from the reliability monitor we can understand which applications have caused problems and can take steps to solve them. We could know the applications that contribute to the poor performance of the system. Then we can optimize our system. If an application that is seldom used lowers the performance of the system, then we can uninstall it. Thus we can analyze the cause of the problems and take steps to solve them.
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