I recently ran across a problem with the date/time data
that is output to a text file from the system monitor. The error came to
light as I was preparing an analysis on a series of performance monitoring data
files for an upcoming article. I noticed that the times being recorded
were not the times that I had scheduled for monitoring. In fact, they were
consistently 5 hours off. It turns out that there is a known issue with
this in Windows 2000, and Microsoft has a supported fix for it (KB article
Q262857). You will need to call
Microsoft support and ask for the fix. Reference the KB article to clue them in, and you shouldn't have to pay for any support.
Without the fix, the date and time recorded in the log file is set to UTC
(Universal Time Coordinate) instead of your local time (unless you actually live
in the GMT time zone), making it somewhat more difficult to coordinate
performance data with the actual occurrence of events on your system.
I have a utility that converts the wide matrix of performance information in
these (or any) log files into row-based data, and stores the results in a narrow
table. It is easy enough to update the date and time for the existing
records, so all of the data will be uniform after I apply the fix.
Some other items to note: Binary log files are not affected by this
problem. I thought that this date/time issue may have
been fixed with SP1, but a cursory search of the knowledge base and the list of
bug fixes did not turn up anything definitive. Also, this is not a problem
on every Windows 2000 machine - so only apply the fix if needed.
Thanks go out to Andy Warren for locating the KB article.
