In the past few years, many administrators have relied on the so called Xperf tool for troubleshooting all kinds of performance issues, including slow logons. This tool has gained popularity for its ability to provide graphical analysis, stack tracing, process lifetime details, and so on.

Due to its popularity, it was supposed to become a mainstream tool for all Windows administrators. However, Microsoft soon released a tool called Windows Performance Recorder to replace Xperf.

The decision taken by Microsoft to rename and release a better and easy-to-configure tool was due to the fact that obtaining traces with Xperf was at times complex and required administrators to work hard to correctly configure it using stack-wise flags.

Microsoft released Windows Performance Recorder, where they have created a UI that looks quite easy to configure and has made the life of a Windows administrator easy.

It is available as a part of the Windows SDK kit for Windows 8...