If you ask the Login VSI support department what they think is the most important part of a Login VSI test they will probably reply with “performance data”. External performance data from VMware ESXtop or Microsoft Performance Monitor is extremely valuable to fully understand the impact of a Login VSI test in a centralized desktop environment. But when it comes to parsing or filtering this performance data, it can be a pain in the butt because of three reasons:

1. Performance data files can be very large. The ESXtop file in the screenshot below is over 60MB.

2. Loading this file takes quite some time and this can cause errors.

3. Headers can be very difficult to read and this makes it difficult to locate the right metrics.

PPD (Parse Performance Data)

Even with the useful PowerShell trick from Mark Plettenberg “Login VSI Tips and Tricks: Cleaning up ESXtop log files using PowerShell” this still can take a while. Since I am performing a lot of performance tests with Login VSI, I was tired of having to wait a long time to collect external data so I decided to create a tool myself. This tool, named PPD (Parse Performance Data), can save your day in parsing/filtering these large CSV files.

PPD is a small command line based tool which filters these files and creates a clean Microsoft Excel sheet including charts (usually within seconds). This is done based on the metrics you specified that needs to be collected. It even creates charts so you quickly can see the trend in the metrics of the test.

You can download this tool for free right here.

You can use PPD by following these four easy steps:

1. Download PPD.zip and extract the files

2. Use Metrics.txt to configure the metrics that you would like to collect.

3. Open a command prompt and run PPD.exe with the /f and the CSV file as parameter.

4. Locate and open the new Excel sheet in the same directory

5. Done! The Excel sheet (in this case with VMware ESXtop performance data) even includes charts

It’s that easy. If you are doing a lot of performance tests with Login VSI, this tool is a must have in your toolkit!

Please note that I created this tool myself and I am offering this for free to the community. Login VSI does not offer any support for this tool.