Supporting production applications will be challenging if not familiar with administration commands. So here are things you should be familiar with windows, which will help you as an administrator to troubleshoot, support applications in daily life.
CPU Information
CPU information is often needed for troubleshooting performance issues or working on capacity planning.
1. Check how many CPU exist
Go to Task Manager Click on the “Performance” tab to see the number of CPU available
You may also use a wmic command to get CPU information.
Open Command Prompt Type below command and press enter
2. Check CPU Processor type
Right-click on Computer and click on Properties Look for processor details under System section
You may also use “wmic cpu” command to get this information.
Finding Memory Information
Often needed in a combination of CPU to troubleshoot the application performance issue.
3. Check Installed Memory and Utilization
Go to Task Manager Click on “Performance” tab » Memory
As you can see total/available/utilized memory You may also use systeminfo command to check available physical memory.
4. Check Uptime/Boot time
If your Windows server is rebooted unexpectedly and needs to find out when exactly it happened then this would be very handy. Use the below command on the command prompt. If you need to find out process start time in Windows, then you can refer here.
5. Check TCP Packet Errors
If you are troubleshooting network related problems, then this would be probably one of the first things to check. Use netstat command to check for any errors.
6. Check all running processes
To list all the tasks running with their PID and Memory usage, you can use tasklist command. If you need to check a particular process running or not, you may use tasklist with findstr. Ex: Alternatively, you can also use Task Manager to see all the running processes with its CPU/Memory/Disk/Network utilization.
7. Kill the running process
Often used if a process is not responding and you need to kill it. You may either kill the process with “taskkill” command or Task Manager.
To kill using taskkill
Open command prompt Execute taskkill command with process PID
To kill using Task Manager
Open Task Manager Right-click on the process you want to kill and click on “End task.”
8. Find out IP, Subnet Mask; MAC address
ipconfig is a handy command to find out the IP address of the Windows server. This will display the entire Ethernet adaptor and their IP address. If you need to find out the details in depth, then you can use /all syntax. To flush the DNS cache, you can use /flushdns syntax. This will be often helpful if you have done some DNS changes and it’s not reflected due to data stored in the cache.
9. Display user and group information
“whoami” command will help you to check the user details of logged in user and the group it belongs to. To check the group it belongs to
10. Perform DNS lookup
“nslookup” command will help to find out DNS resolving IP address. If your network administrator blocks nslookup to external DNS, then you may use online tools to perform DNS lookup.
11. Capture network trace
You can use netsh command to capture the trace if you don’t have Wireshark or other capture software installed. To stop the capture I hope the above helps you to get familiar with some of the Windows administration related tasks. If you are a newbie, I would strongly recommend this online course.
